A New Leaf
Unsure as to what exactly his next steps should be, Doyle did the only thing that seemed to make sense and took down the book on The Powers That Be that the old man had given him over two years before. He had read it at the time, of course, he had even learned things from it, but he had drunk a lot and been beaten up a lot since then. His memory wasn't everything it could be and he decided it was time for a refresher.
He sat cross legged on the sofa and read the book from cover to cover. He ran out of cigarettes about a third of the way through, and didn't bother to go and buy any more. At the halfway point he decided to take notes, grabbed a pad and pen and went back to the beginning - jotting down anything that seemed important: conduits, sacred spots, words for incantations, the steps to perform certain rituals.
By the time he made it to the end of the book, he was out of liquor as well as out of cigarettes. His mouth was dry, his lips parched, after spending so long concentrating without taking any kind of comfort break - and, after so many hours sitting down, he peeled himself off the sofa, stretched out his muscles and then shuffled off to the sink to get a cup of water. Well, there was nothing else for him to drink.
It was as he stood in the kitchen, sipping his water, that his eyes settled on the pile of dishes standing beside the sink, leftovers crusted onto them. His eyes raked further over to the trash, which was overflowing with takeout cartons. He glanced to the floor and saw how filthy the carpet was - he wasn't sure he'd run a hoover over the place the whole time he'd lived here. And that was nearly four years now.
His laundry basket was overflowing as well. His bedsheets were crumpled and covered in crumbs. There were tens of liquor bottles just stacked up on the coffee table - all of them empty - and the ashtray was filled to the brim with ground out cigarette butts.
It felt like he was seeing the place for the first time, seeing it through fresh eyes. How could he live like this? How could this be his home?
He lowered the cup from his lips, slowly, and tried to work out where best to start. It felt like trying to solve a rubix cube - so many different parts that all hinged around each other. Then he decided the trash was probably the best place to begin - get rid of that, and everything else would follow.
Dumping the cup of water on the side, he crossed to the trash can, put his hands on his hips, took a deep breath and then started to wrestle the garbage bag from out of the can. It was tough going. The overflow tippled out and lay strewn across the floor. The bag was so full it didn't want to come out of the can and he had to tug and heave and wrestle it out. And then the bag split, sending more garbage spilling across the cheap lino.
With a deep sigh, he rooted under the sink for another trash bag and started to collect up the over spill and toss it in the new bag. Then he emptied some of the garbage from the old bag into the new one - so it wasn't quite so full. Then he took out a third trashbag and placed the original, split one inside of it - so more garbage wouldn't fall out on the way out. He tied the tops, picked up both bags, throwing them over his shoulders - and began the long trudge down the stairs to the dumpsters.
Then he came back up and collected all his liquor bottles together. He was planning on just tossing them, when it suddenly dawned on him that maybe he could redeem them for some cash. It would be embarrassing handing all these bottles over but … it would get him some money. And he needed money. He rooted out a cardboard box, one of the ones he had used to move his stuff in here years ago, and carefully stacked all the bottles inside and then put them by the door.
The coffee table was suddenly clearer than he had seen it in months - years even. There were ring stains from the bottles all over and the ashtray was still disgusting, but he could actually see the surface of it and that made the whole apartment look better. Which made him feel better - like a weight being lifted from his shoulders - and spurred him on to do more cleaning.
He picked up the ashtray, wondering how best to go about scrubbing all the ends and ash out of there… and then decided it was too gross to even contend with. He took it over to his window, leaned out as far as he could, so he could see the dumpster in the street below - and then dropped the ashtray, throwing the whole thing away.
He wouldn't have anywhere to stub out his cigarettes now … but then again he didn't have any cigarettes in the house. Maybe it was time to quit altogether.
Then, beginning to feel pretty upbeat, he went back into the kitchen, dug under the sink for a pair of pink marigold rubber gloves and filled up the sink ready to scrub the kitchen floor - cleaning up the sticky and stinking spillages from where he had wrestled three rounds with the trash can. Once that was done, it was time for the dishes - and once they were piled high on the draining board, he took his cloth, marigolds still on, and went to scrub at the ring marks on the coffee table.
Then it was laundry time. He bundled up all his clothes that were in the hamper, stripped the bed of its sheets and bundled them together and then removed all the couch and cushion covers from the sofa. Struggling under his armfuls of dirty washing, he staggered and stumbled his way down to the basement, where the washing machines were kept, and loaded up as many as were free.
Once the machines were on, and his laundry was being swooshed around in the soapy water very satisfactorily, he headed back upstairs and started his attack on the carpet. He got out the dustpan and brush first and swept up the very worst of the worst - and then he unearthed the vacuum cleaner and hoovered up the rest. Then he dried the dishes and put them away.
And then he collapsed on the sofa - minus its cushion covers - and wished he had a cigarette or a drink. But he didn't, and his laundry would be finishing soon, he needed to go back down to the basement and tumble dry it.
Once the dryers were on, he stood and watched them - still wishing for a cigarette. But he had already made up his mind. Sort of. He was going to try and quit. It wasn't like he had ever actually enjoyed smoking. It was just something he had got into, because it felt right - the sort of thing a man like him should do. But now he was going to try and stop being a man like him, he was going to try and be better. And a better man wouldn't smoke.
His hands twitched, though. It wasn't just his body craving nicotine, his hands felt empty and useless as he just stood there, waiting for the dryers to finish. Like they should be doing something … like holding a cigarette. He shoved his hands in his pockets, hoping if he could hide them then they wouldn't feel so empty. The fingers of his right hand brushed against something, he dug deeper, and then his fist closed around his pack of playing cards. He pulled them out.
Now his hands weren't empty, he felt the need for a cigarette less keenly. He wasn't sure why - but that's how it was. Carefully, he took the cards out of their pack, dropped the empty box back into his pocket and then began to shuffle the deck. The longer he shuffled, the more the cravings receded.
He got so lost in shuffling and cutting the deck and cascading the cards and shuffling again, that he looked up in surprise when the dryers beeped - and he realised they had reached the end of their cycle. He had forgotten where he was and what he was doing. Pocketing the cards, he emptied all the machines, carried all his stuff back up the many flights of stairs to his apartment and then began to sort through: putting his sheets back on his bed, the covers back on the couch, and putting his newly clean clothes away.
Once he was finished, he looked around - the place looked loads better, almost unrecognisable. He opened the window a crack, to let in some fresh air - to try and air out the smell of smoke which clung to everything. This place was still what it was, a one room flophouse in a seedy part of town … but it was a clean one room flophouse. It looked like it belonged to someone who took care of it, someone respectable … someone's whose life had some semblance of meaning - who wasn't cold and desperate and lonely and drowning.
Just looking around at the clean apartment made him feel better, made his head feel clearer, made him feel like maybe he wasn't reading that book for nothing - maybe he was the kind of man that could do something more with his life, be something more.
He sat on the sofa that evening, ignoring his cravings for a cigarette and shuffling his cards to keep his hands busy.
...
The next day, he took the box of empty liquor bottles out to the recycle centre and handed them over. The man on the desk didn't say anything about how many there were and Doyle tried not to look shifty, tried to look like he had been collecting these for years and only now had enough to make it worth his while to hand them in. He figured people must do that, they couldn't come down here with every single empty bottle individually - they must wait until they had a car load to make the run. It wasn't necessarily obvious what a problem he had, just from the sheer amount of bottles he had to redeem.
Once he had the money, he got back on the bus and headed back towards home. He could practically feel the dollars burning a hole in his pocket, and he thought about stopping off at the liquor store and getting himself another bottle of whisky and a pack of cigarettes.
The bus let him off at his stop, and he stepped down onto the sidewalk and stared across at the liquor store - and thought about crossing over and going in. And then he shook his head, turned around and decided to walk all the way to the All Seeing Eye - the arcane little shop where he had been given the book on the PTB.
He would use this money to buy another book. And instead of spending the night drinking, he would spend it researching. He was going to start doing things differently.
