Zen and the Art of Vacuum Cleaning

Everything I touched this week crumbled.

And now it’s ending, day number 7, the grand finale, with a bullet. The clouds have hung heavy for five straight days, dropping thick, fat raindrops, on and off, throughout the valley.

I pull myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, brush my hair and clip it back and brace myself for the early morning cold. When I put the car key into the door, it jams, stuck halfway in. I’m shivering, my fingers are swollen as I jimmy the key a bit. No luck. This is how it begins.

I unlock the car through the passenger side with the wind biting through my clothes, every muscle contracts and shakes. My head is congested beyond belief. It is as if my sinuses are a factory that manufactures gobs of mucus to be packaged and warehoused in my tonsils. Even though I’m running late for work I need Starbucks to soothe my scratchy throat and supply me with some instant personality. I drive 4 miles out of my way to get to one with a drive-through.

I make it to the gym at 7am, right on time. I open the door and grab my coffee but the lid is loose and it drops down hard and splashes all over the console.

I don’t have time to clean it properly plus I’m freezing so I grab a cloth shopping bag that is lying on the back seat and hastily wipe up the spill. I then scrunch up the bag and press it into the cup holder to absorb any remaining liquid and leave it there to dry.

I have to open the gym. It’s now 7:05 am and I’m cold, sticky, congested and late.


Enter into my life... The Dyson…

My first task of the day is to vacuum. In the four years I’ve worked at the gym we’ve gone through numerous replacements of the same model vacuum cleaner, until last week. Last week is when the gym bought a Dyson. Pause for applause. Even gym members have noticed and commented.

The Dyson looks like something from the future. I size it up and figure it must have cost the gym a good $400 to $600. I figure out how to turn it on, so far so good. Then I instinctively move my foot to press the step to decline the handle. No step.

I search the machine up and down. It’s beautiful with its clear tank, twisty metallic colored hose and bright turquoise ball-style wheel but I can’t use it until I find the button that releases the handle. Then I realize that all I have to do is tilt it, there’s no button or step to press, nothing more is needed. Simple. But sometimes the simplest solution takes a while to figure out.

So I’ve turned it on and tilted the handle and now I can push it across the scratchy red gym carpet and suck up stray lint with satisfaction as I daydream about the past week. It wasn’t a good one.

There are times when the earth alters just slightly, but enough to cause a person to question what she once thought was real. Sometimes it’s something slight like a key that won’t fit into a lock anymore, or a head that feels heavier than normal or rain clouds that float too low for too many days. Sometimes just a few words can distort reality and send the whole planet off kilter, spinning everything into an irregular orbit.

Somebody at the front counter needs to buy an energy drink so I shut off the vacuum and rush over, pressing buttons on the register. The drawer pops open and pushes everything in front of it onto the floor, my purse, my notebook, cleaning spray and a bottle of water.

Once I pick that up, I go back to vacuuming and back to my thoughts. There’s an idea of me, a picture that keeps morphing into other images, a watercolor painting that won’t dry with colors that bleed into themselves to form something completely different.

I feel so misunderstood.

I want people to really see me but I can’t Photoshop or touch up or airbrush their thoughts. People see me through their own lens and how can I fix that when I keep changing to myself every instant.

I’m thinking all this while people funnel into the gym, one by one, and time ticks on the clock and I'm rounding a corner continuing to vacuum. The Dyson sucks up debris like there’s no tomorrow. Then I hear a slurpy clunk and out of the corner of my eye I think I see a small brown wiry object, a bobby pin, get eaten and then the vacuum shuts off.

Nooooooooo.

I turn the vacuum over hoping to see the culprit clog sticking out the bottom. No luck. I twist the brush bar a little but it’s all clear. Looks like I’m going to have to operate, a scary thought considering I can’t even unlock doors without breaking them. I must find a screwdriver, open up the cleaner head somehow, figure out how to remove the hose and dislodge the offending object.

Meanwhile, swallowing is a huge ordeal because of the thick goop stuck in the back of my throat, my skin is heating up, my eyes feel heavy and my stomach is speaking in alien tongues, but there’s a list of chores I must complete so I abandon the Dyson for the time being.

Ah, I see that last Sunday I used permanent instead of dry-erase marker on the otherwise erasable cleaning chart, nice touch.

I begin to disinfect the weight machines with a white rag, lemony astringent and plastic gloves and my thoughts of poor, misunderstood me linger seductively, beckoning me to indulge and dwell.

But here’s the thing.

The sun has come out for the first time in five days allowing a view of the mountains to the north. The day is crisper than a drop of water on a leaf and I can see every ridge of the mountains. Snow has fallen on top of them and every speckled powdery crevice is clear. The sky is a perfect blue.

And the members of the gym are in good moods today. For every one grouchy person there are 5 who know my name and wish me a good day. I’m sure part of this newfound joy is caffeine induced, but that doesn't matter because I feel cheerful as I clean the equipment.

I look over toward the vacuum cleaner from a different place in the room. I see it from a different perspective and notice that the plug is not in the outlet. Oops, I guess I should have checked that first. I plug it in and it starts. Simple. No operation necessary.

I go back to my thoughts with clearer insight now, looking at my thoughts from a new perspective. There's nothing for me to control or change. Everything is simple.

I am not a static picture. I change to myself with every instant like dripping watercolors blending together.

So in this way the Dyson, in addition to being a great vacuum cleaner, this past Sunday, after a long week of disappointment, was also my Zen master.

Pop

My creepy neighbor watched me walk from my car to the apartment building. He peeked over his balcony wall, his black hair slicked back like crow feathers.

I scowled hard at him and ran up three stories of stairs without stopping. I unlocked my door as fast as I could and slammed it shut, locked it, stood against it while I caught my breath. Why was he always watching me?

I’d been feeling woozy all day and my stomach hurt so I fell into my couch, closed my eyes and spiraled into a deep, black sleep.



I’m walking into a movie theatre but the movie has already started. I can tell it’s scary by the music’s rhythmic urgency. I’m standing at the side, waiting until my eyes adjust to the dark so I can find an empty seat.

On the screen, a man wearing fingerless black leather gloves and holding a knife is walking with large strides toward his victim who has fallen. The music becomes more erratic as he thrusts the knife into and out of his victim’s flesh over and over and over again.

I see an empty seat etched in the dark. It’s in the middle of a row full of people, so I inch my way past a tangle of legs. I sit on something squishy. The chair is full of lumps that feel like soft toads. I squirm, trying to get comfortable and bump the man’s arm who is in the seat next to mine. “Quiet!” He hisses. He pushes his face inches from mine and gives me the meanest look I would ever see.

In the movie, the man with the black leather gloves tracks down victims grimly in a forest until each one falls at his feet before him. Then he sticks his hooked hunting knife through layers of skin, tearing flesh apart to reveal the organs and guts within, spilling pools of blood on the dirt.

One of the lumps in my seat is moving. It inches its way out from under me and scurries up my arm. “AAAAGGGHHHH,” I jump out of my seat and fling it off. A two inch long roach lands on the man’s head in the seat in front of me. People turn around to see what the commotion is. Their pale faces reveal sad, tired eyes. My stomach cramps up so tight it buckles me over and I fall to the floor.

Crows circle overhead, above the audience, cawing in slow drawn out moans. Their feathers fall to the ground in lazy whispers. I grab a fistful out of my hair.

In the movie, blood is everywhere, flowing freely. It seems to be leaking out through a rip in the screen and dripping onto the theatre floor. Something is terribly wrong. A searing pain rips through my insides.



I screamed and woke myself up. I sat up on my couch trying to decide if I should take myself to the hospital. The pain in my stomach is unbearable.

At that moment the room began to shake. The building shimmied from side to side, with an effortless violence, flinging me onto the floor. Five seconds, that was all, then nothing.

The damage was done. Furniture had tipped over, bookshelves had fallen, windows exploded inward, dishes, books, pictures, everything had been tossed and broken and shattered.

I stumbled across the mess to my bathroom and scooped cold water onto my face, letting it drip freely down my chin as I looked at myself in the mirror.

I seemed unreal. My blue eyes had dulled into a dry gray and were sinking further into their sockets. My skin looked rubbery and loose.

I heard him before I saw him. A slight rustling sound caught my attention and then he rounded the corner and stood in the doorway to my bathroom. It was the creepy man from downstairs.

“What are you doing here?” I yelled.

“I’m trying to get you to wake up.” He said and his eyes seemed empty and tired.

I looked down on the floor between us and saw a growing puddle of blood on the tiles. “What have you done?” But I did not wait around for the answer.

I raced out of my apartment and down the stairs. No matter how fast I ran I felt him with me, exhaling a slow wind, like a whisper, against the back of my neck. I ran across the street and then stopped to catch my breath.

He was already there, ahead of me, waiting. “I just want you to wake up.” He said.



Once outside, I realized that the city had fallen into pandemonium.

People were running down sidewalks and across streets, scattering in all different directions the way bugs scatter under sudden light. Blurred faces zoomed toward me and then away.

Things were not in their proper places. An apartment building down the street had collapsed from the earthquake. Cars were merged into each other as if someone had picked up the land and tipped it sideways.

I grabbed a girl’s arm as she tried to run past me. I saw her face and fell into a curious déjà vu. I knew this girl.

In an instant the past came back and I could see the entire world in a drop of rain.

Carole was my best friend in sixth grade. We were inseparable. We drew monsters with felt tip pens and made up stories about them at my kitchen table.

We swam in the swim team together. At meets everybody knew that if I didn’t win she would. Nobody could even come close. We read British comic books about orphaned girls who lived in evil boarding schools. Her mom cooked us beignets for breakfast at sleepovers and always gave me extra powdered sugar.

I tried to hug Carole but she slipped through me as if I didn’t exist.

She had gone back to England for good with her family the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I spent the rest of summer making up stories by myself. School started in the fall but I remained lost. Drawing wasn’t as fun anymore. Nothing was the same. I dropped out of swim team. I lost my bearings.

She had disappeared into the air like a wandering bubble, and then left again a thousand times more, over and over as time went on. Then again didn’t everybody?




Something far off caught my eye. I turned my gaze to the horizon. Something was happening off in the distance, a good 75 miles away. It was a wall of gray water rising up from behind the mountains. A mass of water, spreading as far as the eye could see, crashed down over the tops of cliffs and pushed through trees, and anything in its way.

The mountains began falling. Brown cascaded into brown like stairs sliding into each other, flattening into a landslide. Clouds of dirt arose and expanded. Wild rivers formed and rushed through the valleys, destroying everything, searching for more. It was only a matter of time now.

I headed to the elementary school nearby where masses of people were gathering in the football field. The man with tired eyes, my neighbor, stayed with me, watching, saying nothing. My stomach pains worsened. It felt as if razor blades were carving initials into the lining of my gut.

The sky and clouds grayed above me. The oncoming waters were at the city limits now. Huge waves reduced the buildings downtown to piles of plaster and dust.

Everybody at the football field was somebody from my past.

Even my dad was there wearing black rimmed glasses. His dark brown hair was combed to one side, the way it had been when he was younger, years before he died.

I ran toward him but he disappeared the same way Carole had.

Even a cat I once had when I was 8 was there. She was trying to climb a tree by the fence. Her body was all black except for white paws and a white triangle on her nose. I remembered her doing backward somersaults to catch feathers on sticks and sleeping on my pillow at night purring loudly into my ear.

I used to open the door and call her home at the same time every day, 8pm. “Tabitha,” I would yell into the night. One night she didn’t come.

I tried again. And again. Every night for a month I repeated the very same routine, yelling her name as loud as I could. Each night my voice sounded more desperate, more aching.

My dad and I searched the neighborhood by foot and then again by car. Each night I expected to see her trotting into the house, tail in the air, heading directly to her food dish, the way she used to, but that never happened.

Now, here she was, at the football field, but only for a moment. She climbed a tree and disappeared when she was halfway up. One moment she was there and then she wasn’t, just like everything else.

Memories popped like soap bubbles. Whenever I tried to hold onto them, they disintegrated in my hands, one after another.

The walls of water were closing in. Rushing waves crashed into streets and freeways swallowing cars, houses and the people in them. Everything crumbled around me until nothing else remained. The tides had caught up to where I was, there was no place else to run.

I stood in the middle of the world and surrendered. I just let it happen.

The water slammed into me with the force of a train. I let go of the struggle and allowed the black current to carry me away. I tumbled and tossed in the grips of the tides.

Everything washed away. I heard a thumping in the silence, like the beating of a heart, then nothing, then an endless buzz.



The man with the empty, tired eyes looked down at me. This time he was wearing blue scrubs stained with blood, my blood. My body was hooked to all kinds of machines. It was bloated and distorted from the blood transfusions. The sad, hollow faces of the nurses and assistants stood over me.

“You did everything you could to wake her up, doctor.”

The pain in my stomach was finally gone.





My friend and I had just seen a scary movie. Her car was on the other end of the parking lot so we said goodbye and parted ways. I was a row away from my white Toyota when it happened. This wiry kid, in his early 20s, popped out from between two parked SUVs. He wore a black baseball cap and black fingerless leather gloves. He was holding a hooked hunter’s knife and told me to give him all my money. “Come on, come on.” His hands trembled in jagged waves. He pushed his face inches from mine and gave me the meanest look I would ever see.



I pulled my wallet out of my purse but it, along with a bunch of coins, fell to the ground, clanking and clattering loudly. “Quiet,” he hissed. I bent down to pick up my wallet. He tried to yank my purse out of my hands as I arose but my arm was still stuck in the strap and flung hard into his.

He slapped my jaw with the back of his hand. I screamed. I shouldn’t have. But I did. He didn’t hesitate. He shoved the knife into my gut and back out, over and over and over again. Then he got the hell out of there. I fell into the side of a car, blood gushing out of my abdomen. I slid down the side of it and fell onto the ground.

I tried to yell for help but my cries came out in gurgled chokes. I was lying in fetal position, clutching my stomach. Blood was everywhere, flowing freely.

By the time somebody showed up the crows had already found me. They cawed and pecked at my hands and feet, squabbling with each other, shedding feathers. A two inch long roach had crawled onto my arm to rest. I was too weak to fling it off.

When the paramedics arrived I could barely see. They talked to me in hushed voices trying to soothe me and then all went black.





I rose out of my body from the hospital bed to look for my mom. She was sitting on a wooden chair in a small room holding her head in her hands, sobbing. The man with the pale face and tired eyes, my doctor, my hero, came into the room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

He explained everything to her. He told her I’d fallen into a coma after the operation of my ruptured spleen. The blood loss had just been too significant. My organs had shut down one after the other. He had tried to do everything he could to wake me up. My mom went limp.

First my dad, now me.




I see the whole world now in a drop of rain. Tsunamis strike. Cities and buildings fall. Planes crash into towers and explode into bombs. Men cheat on their wives. Mothers tell their children they wish they’d never been born. People leave just when they are needed the most. The sun falls behind the earth leaving darkness and loneliness.

I spent a lifetime standing in the middle of the world, trying to stop everybody from leaving. But everything, including my life, simply pops like a bubble, in the end, and disappears into eternity.

And now it’s my turn to leave. Pop.

Circles

My life is a series of circles.

Tissue, milk, shampoo, eggs, orange juice, frozen pizza, cotton balls, toilet paper, one by one, all items get scanned. Buttons are pressed. Money is taken. Change handed back. “Have a great day”. Repeat. Over and over. Day after day. A neverending loop.

Suddenly a voice jolts me out of an endless continuum. A familiar voice. His voice.

“Why is it,” he begins, “that every time I see your face my day gets better?”

I bite my bottom lip and my gaze moves upward, up arms, chest, shoulders, face, until my eyes meet his and I can not stop smiling.

“Maybe you just really love shopping.”

“Oh no, Laura…” His voice is pure friction. “it’s definitely you.”

And just that fast I fall and keep falling. Thump. A thousand shards of glass scatter. Thoughts stop. My blood loops, twists and drops, deep, deeper. It happens just that easy. I’m gone. Again.

He asks me out and I say yes even though every brain cell in my head is saying ‘Alert, Alert, Don’t do it’. I should know better by now. Every time I’ve dared to disturb the perfect roundness of my world, it collapses under my feet into disjointed lines. Just when somebody thinks they know me, thinks I’m who they really wanted, something happens and I disappoint them. Every. Single. Time.

Jack picks me up in his silver Ford Mustang. I’m wearing a tight black strapless dress, a mask of makeup and a shield of perfume, armed and ready for battle.

I walk up the steps of Vido’s Italian Restaurant trying not to fall in 2-inch heels. Inside, shelves of wine bottles line the pale green walls. We’re seated under a strawberry stained glass chandelier. Two candle flames dance shadows across the table and seem to burn in Jack’s hazel eyes. Jack’s gaze could melt gold.

He orders a bottle of the house burgundy. I swallow thick red-purple and breathe in deeply.

“So tell me Jack… What do you look for in a woman?”

“Ummm…” He looks up and tilts his head to one side, “I’m not quite sure… maybe femininity?” So I order the minestrone soup and salad instead of the four cheese lasagna.

After initial small talk, an awkward lull surrounds us. Jack shifts in his seat and glances elsewhere. I’m losing this battle. I have to think fast.

I ask him about his job as a securities lawyer and it works. He comes alive explaining something called FINRA which I don’t understand but that doesn’t matter.

Then a loud clanking sucks me out of Jack’s orbit. A man with Nick Nolte mugshot hair and shriveled eyes is waving his fork at his companion, who is slumped over her plate, long earrings dangling into her food.

“Numbers don’t lie.” He’s yelling at her.

I try to ignore the distraction.

“I paint.” I blurt out to Jack, “Did I ever tell you that?”

Trying to keep the conversation fresh, I describe how pressing the stiff hairs of a paintbrush through globs of oiled color and spreading them precisely on a rough canvas is everything I need to save my world. Well almost everything.

But as I talk my voice is overtaken, once again, by our neighbor, Mr. Crazy. He’s spewing food with each rant and clanking and scratching his fork against his glass.

He starts hacking up some sort of crackling phlegm from his throat and the waiter looks over but does nothing. The woman is shuddering, head hanging just inches above her plate. She’s shaking. Oh no! She’s crying!

“Good for nothing, that’s you.” He says.

“Excuse me,” I say to Jack.

I push my chair back and walk over to the table. I grab the fork right out of the crazy man’s hand.

“Leave this woman alone!” I say. 

The woman looks up and I swear she gives me the tiniest sliver of a smile. The crazy man glares but says nothing. Jack’s eyes are full of surprise.

Our waiter delivers our meals and as we start to eat, Jack looks at me and says, “I know how to answer your question now.”

“What question?”

“What I look for in a woman.”

“Yeah… What?”

“Spunk.”

He looks at me, through me, into me, breaking into my circle, melding into my universe, entering my bloodstream.

I look down at my food. I’m smiling. I bite my bottom lip. Heat is rising. I feel flushed. Maybe this time will be different.

Divorce

We were in the middle of slathering a deep periwinkle blue onto the walls of our bedroom when he stopped and turned toward me, paintbrush in hand, and told me that we needed to talk. Sunlight snuck in through gaps in the curtains creating shadows on the furniture and on half of his face.

He opened his mouth and started talking but I was lost in a memory. My old 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Vincent, was lecturing to us about how things aren’t always what they seem to be.

“Does anybody know the true color of the sun?” He asked the class.

We all shouted out various responses. Red, blue, white, yellow.

“Okay, well in a way all of you are right. The sun contains strong amounts of red, blue, yellow and green light. And because the light is so intense it saturates each of the eyes’ color receptors causing the brain to interpret the color as white."


Fresh paint trickled into dark blue drops onto the newspaper-covered floor as he continued to talk, talk, talk. His voice was traveling down a long tunnel from somewhere far away. His words echoed around and above me, words about some girl he’d gotten to know a few months ago, how he’d gone too far with her and how he and I had been drifting apart for a long time now anyway.

Fractured sunlight shadowed his face and it seemed like he was wearing a mask and I wanted to take it off. I went over to the curtains and ripped them apart allowing in a flood of sunlight. He faded into the background like an overexposed photo and I had to squint to see him.

He was in the middle of blaming me, having a one-sided argument, justifying bad behavior, making this all my fault. This other girl apparently had more ambition, a better job, dressed better, had nicer hair, cared more, did more, was more.

While over-explaining his case, he backed up into the ladder that was leaning against the wall where the roller pan, roller, bucket of brushes and can of paint sat on the bottom step. Everything was slipping. I saw them falling and reached out my hands but they spilled one by one, as if in slow motion, hitting the floor, bouncing up, pounding loudly on the black and white tiled floor, splattering blue paint everywhere.

I grabbed the old towels that protected the furniture and began to clean up the mess. Whenever something slips, I clutch and grab with all my might. I can’t just sit back and watch things falling or spilling or sliding away. But sooner or later everybody goes. Leaves fall off trees when it’s autumn, parents eventually die, the sun falls behind the earth at dusk making everything colder, cars drive away and get smaller and smaller until they, and the people in them, disappear into the distance.

It was unfair. How could he forget the good things about me so easily like they never existed. I was there for him for so many things, like when his mom died and when he lost his job. And what about the good times. Had he forgotten about the Del Taco runs at midnight and the weekend movie marathons, sleeping in on Sundays till noon then getting bagels. I wanted to remind him but a person can waste a lifetime trying to make someone really see her.

“It’s over isn’t it?” I said.

He turned his head and slipped away.

The stages of post-breakup:

First, Depression. For a short minute I’d watch something funny on TV or have a lighthearted conversation at work and I’d find myself laughing. Laughing. But then the thoughts pounded in my mind like a drum. Every song on the radio, every restaurant we’d eaten at, even subjects we’d talked about throbbed. Everything hurt, even my skin.

Next, Comparison. Next to every single woman on the planet, I come out behind. That’s what being cheated on feels like. Your lover compares you to another and decides that you should be the loser. What was so wrong with me that I couldn’t be loved, just once, just for being me.

Finally, Consolation. In the past I’d always been good at that part. I’d tell myself things like:
“He’ll see what he’s missing and want me back.”
“I’m too mature for him.”
“There’s somebody better out there for me.”
But those thoughts were just shadows that I couldn't hide behind anymore. Underneath those thoughts lie the cold, hard truth. Emptiness. Loneliness.

“What makes the sky blue, Mr. Vincent?”

“Well… when the white light of the sun enters the atmosphere, gas molecules absorb its color waves and because the blue light wavelength is shorter it radiates outward easier. Our color receptors in our eyes that interpret the shorter wavelength sends the signal to our brain which interprets the color as blue when we look up."


So what is it that remains after the sun travels west and falls off the earth, when dusk rises up and swallows the light, now that he’s gone and I stay alone?

What remains after all of the excuses and defenses, anguish and resistance is a blinding nothingness as bright as the white of the sun. My 8th grade teacher taught me that every color wave combined creates white and what I've learned over the years is that at the center of white, where everything turns to nothing, is peace.

♫ Goodbye, lay the blame on love...♪