WHAT IT IS

A concrete floor that's always damp. The small room under The Big Blue Building. He tries to bring a mattress into the small room by himself. He had found the mattress on the bank of a stream. The mattress is a heavy queen because it has water in it still, and it buckles unexpectedly as he tries to cram it into his small room that smells of the damp. He has no one to help him. He knows no one in the town. There are young people living in The Big Blue Building, but he is too shy to speak with them, and, anyway, the man who told him he could live in The Big Blue Building said that he couldn't let anyone know he was living there because he was living there free. He wasn't sure if the man who told him he could live in the Building even owned the Building. The young people work at a nearby mountain and are from some other country. At the mountain, they operate machines that grab people by the heads and lift them up to the top of the mountain. Or they work in stores, selling rocks and hallucinogenic weeds. Or the the most talented of them work as trainers who teach people how to run and roll down the mountain fast without getting too injured. He drags the mattress into the small room and is pleased to have a bed where once he had a nest of comforters and attic insulation. He lies on the bed and looks at the various things that are in his room. There is an industrial ice machine that no one uses and that he doesn't know how to turn off. Every day, he has to empty buckets of ice out. There is a pile of old cash registers full of money. There is a cage full of bottles of liquor and a refrigerator that smells horrible when he opens it. There is a toilet with no privacy. There is a sink covered with plaster and dripping with tar. The young people must be home from the mountain because he can hear them tromping around above him. They are probably making pasta. He works at the grocery store in town and has often sold them jars of whatever tomato sauce is on sale and cartons and cartons of pasta. It seems they eat only pasta. He isn't sure if they know that he lives in the small concrete room that's below them. They certainly have never recognized him at the grocery store. They've never said hello. They've never crawled under The Big Blue Building to knock on his door and ask if he'd like to come up and have some of their pasta. He wonders what would happen if he ate the toilet piece by piece. He wonders what would have happened, if, as a baby, he had fallen into a bucket of roofing tar or paint. They eat pasta, and he eats tunafish and mustard on crackers. Sometimes, at the grocery store, he works at the registers. He often makes incorrect change, so, whenever he works the register, he makes sure to have a pocketful of quarters and dollars in case he gets the sense that he messed up making change. If he gets such a sense, he sneaks into his drawer a few dollars or quarters just to be safe. His boss, Oregula, used to give him back his change if he went over, but now she doesn't do that anymore. In fact, she's been having him on the registers more and more, and he thinks the reason is that she wants his money, his overage.