God Box

by

Joe Baumann

THE GOD BOX SAT ON THE COUNTER in Burkhardt’s mother’s kitchen, where everything was dark faux-marble lined with white streaks like fat in a steak. Painted pale gold, the box, which was sandwiched between the wall and a trio of LED candles with dust rimming their cupped bulbs, was the kind of thing in which one might keep stationery or old photographs, sewing needles or an erstwhile chequebook. Someone, maybe Burkhardt’s mother, had drizzled white and grey puff paint and silver glitter across its surface. The look was messy, something bombastic: Pollock but gaudy.

After Burkhardt’s mother died, he asked me to help go through her things. She lived in a two-story townhouse that smelled of burnt vacuum cleaner and stale lemon spray. The carpet was shaggy, flecked white-grey-brown, the furniture formal and gilt, all floral-patterned fainting couches and wing-backed chairs. The edges of the coffee table looked murderous.

His mother had only been in her late fifties, taken by a stroke brought on, I assumed, by her smoking habit; we found three ashtrays on her concrete slab of a patio, the glass bowls crowded with butts the size of mealworms. Burkhardt wanted to start there because the furniture was easy – just a little wrought-iron table and a pair of matching chairs. Something nice and simple to checkmark. But when he saw those ashtrays he let out a shudder like he, too, was about to die, and I slipped inside to give him a moment and to get us both a glass of water, though I realized immediately that I didn’t know where anything was.

Burkhardt came inside, armed with the ashtrays. A few cigarette butts spilled to the linoleum as he struggled to slide the screen door closed. I stood, watching. I wasn’t sure how much Burkhardt wanted my hands on things. Obviously I would help haul the couches and tables and mattresses out to the truck he’d rented, but what about smaller, more intimate stuff? I pictured myself rooting through his mother’s medicine cabinet and felt queasy.

“Well,” he said, setting the ashtrays on the counter, ignoring the god box. “Shall we?”

MY OWN MOTHER had thought she might have Parkinson’s. Then it was multiple sclerosis or fibromyalgia. She kept calling me after each referral, diagnosis, prognosis, prescription. She shivered, she shook, she wondered. Her doctors puzzled over charts, lab results, tests. Finally bloodwork revealed high levels of glutamic acid decarboxylase, a telltale sign of Moersch-Woltman syndrome: stiff-person syndrome. I spent days reading about it online. The descriptions were like something out of bad science fiction: how, unchecked, it caused terrible muscle spasms and body rigidity, how although the specific cause was still unknown, it was often linked to various auto-immune disorders. To my knowledge, my mother hadn’t developed any such thing. The source, per her doctors, was a total mystery.

BURKHARDT LOOKED AROUND the living room. Of course he couldn’t possibly be ready to start packing away his mother’s stuff; everything must have struck soreness and grief into his throat.

“I guess it would make sense to do the biggest things first, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

We began with a pair of heavy chesterfield sofas, wrangling them one at a time through the front door. The back legs of the first scraped at the frame, leaving a small scuff that Burkhardt didn’t notice and I didn’t mention. After the couches, we handled the recliner. I knew this was his mother’s favourite place to sit; the leather was cracked with age. Burkhardt barely hesitated as he flung back the lever that raised the footrest so we could extend the chair to fit it out the door. I hoisted the back, struggling to get a good grip. I thought of my mother’s hands, how she struggled now to do even the simplest tasks: picking up the television remote, washing dishes, scrubbing her face, putting on pants or shoes. Brushing her teeth or hair. Microwaving a frozen dinner or slicing an apple. Peeling potatoes.

The plan was to take the furniture to my place. I’d just bought a house and had hardly furnished it: my basement was cavernous and empty, and my one battered couch from college barely filled the living room. My dining room was home to a tiny two-seater pub-height table. The cabinets were practically empty; I owned a handful of cups and reused the same trio of bowls to eat cereal and stews. I didn’t intend to keep Burkhardt’s mother’s things for good; he would sell them or let his sister ship whatever she wanted back to Riverside. She lived in California working as a plastic surgeon – she preferred reconstructive even though most of her clients were wealthy women undergoing cosmetic rhinoplasties and boob jobs – and had barely been able to fly in for the funeral. She’d said several times that she would support whatever he chose to do with their mother’s things. So for now, they would come home with me.

MY MOTHER ALSO HAD A GOD BOX. Inside, she kept notes she wrote to herself, one each day as her body stopped working. I’d found her, early on, sitting at the small writing desk in her breakfast nook, where she’d replaced the bench seats and table. I could see the spikes of her spinal vertebrae through her black shirt as she hunched over, scribbling. When I asked what she was doing she flinched and turned to me, one hand to her chest. She told me I’d frightened her. I could see thick, creamy paper, a fancy ink pen. She never answered my question.

WE TOOK A BREAK after managing to empty out the living room. Burkhardt was sweating, a swampy pair of rings under the armpits of his white t-shirt, a streak along his spine, a spatter on his chest. I felt an anchor weight in my shoulders from hauling the recliner. The room was spare and spinny without the furniture. Divots marked where the coffee table and sofas had sat. Burkhardt’s mother had not been big on décor, so the sole family portrait – her, Burkhardt, his sister – was trying and failing to do the heavy lifting of filling the entire space.

Burkhardt suggested a water break. In the kitchen my eyes went to the god box. Something about how it clashed so with the muted whites and greys of the rest of the kitchen – the refrigerator was a blank steel slate, absent of even a single family photograph or old ‘save the date’ card for a wedding of yesteryear – made it stand out. But Burkhardt, who quickly unearthed a pair of glasses from one of the cabinets, didn’t pay it any mind. Although questions flickered across my tongue, I held them in as I drank my water.

We made decent time for just the two of us, and Burkhardt was convinced we could handle everything, even the mammoth armoire in his mother’s bedroom, which felt like it weighed two tons. He’d pulled out all of her clothing, excising dresses and slacks and even a drawer full of underwear with the cold stoicism of a dentist extracting a compacted tooth, but I was still convinced it would crush one of us as we walked it down the stairs. It creaked and Burkhardt let out little groans; I felt the weight in my fingertips as I clung to the sides. He was in the front, dragging, while I tried to stop the thing from smashing him into the wall. We made it, our arms tingly, backs twinging. We stood outside after.

“Another break, maybe?” I said.

“Okay.”

We sat on the rear lip of the truck. Afternoon had come. The leaves on the maples were starting their turn to orange and red and yellow, little streaks like dyed hair rising among their greenery. Fall was my favourite time of year: sweaters and early twilight, dusk and pumpkin flavours. Burkhardt preferred the swelter of summer, the sweat that gathered at his back, the way his skin absorbed warmth and sun. He lived across the street from a small private university that was still vibrant in the off-months – students playing frisbee on the quad that he could see from his chair. We sat there sometimes, saying no more than we were now, drinking gin rickeys.

I tried to picture how much was left inside the townhouse, but when I started mentally adding the contents of the bathrooms and the guest room and pantry I felt dizzy; we’d already expended so much effort and the mountain was still so huge. I wondered if Burkhardt was feeling or thinking something similar: when I looked over at him he was slumped against the inner wall of the truck, eyes closed. His legs were rocking slowly against the grate like a pair of pendulums. He seemed, despite the glaze of sweat on his brow and the redness of his face, somehow content, almost serene – the quietest and steadiest I’d seen him since he got the news.

AT MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, a two-bedroom home to an army of sewing and craft supplies that her body’s betrayal left useless, her furniture remained. After she couldn’t manage on her own anymore and moved into an assisted living space, she kept the house. She’d lived there for over thirty years. The mortgage was paid off, and her disability insurance, along with the periodic slice into her savings, was enough to pay the property taxes. I went over now and then to check on things, to wipe away any dust, but mostly everything was untouched, as frozen as my mother’s body might one day become.

I couldn’t bring myself to broach the subject of her house. It stood as the thing that represented her recovery: the idea that she might one day sleep in her old bed again, and shower in her familiar bathroom, boil water for tea in her kitchen with its big windows overlooking the back patio. That she’d cut her own grass, an activity she loved so much that I didn’t learn how to start a lawn mower until I was in college. She talked about sorting laundry, cleaning her bedsheets, sitting on her living room sofa with a coffee mug and a book and college basketball on the TV. I couldn’t bring up what we might need to do with her things, whether and when we might sell her home, because to do so meant to shatter the dreams she had of going back in time, going back to that place, in a body that no longer existed as it once had.

BURKHARDT OPENED HIS EYES. “Okay,” he said. “Once more?”

“Where you go I’ll follow,” I said.

“How sweet.”

I hopped down from the truck and held out my hands. Burkhardt took them and I pulled him up. Rather than letting go, however, he drew us together into a sticky hug. I pressed my hands against his damp back and could feel the slide of the muscle around his spine through the wet fabric of his shirt. Burkhardt smelled of effort and something barn-like: hay, the tiniest whiff of sweet-sour.

“Thanks for this,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Not exactly a fun Saturday.”

“What else would I be doing?”

He shrugged, then let me go.

We took a break from heavy lifting – a mattress and a rolltop desk waited upstairs – and instead worked through the rest of the main floor. A half-bath took no time and just one of the cardboard boxes Burkhardt had brought along. I stuffed the soap dispenser and extra toilet paper inside while Burkhardt gently removed a photograph – something artsy, a closeup of an aloe plant that hung above the toilet – from the wall.

“She took this,” he said. It was the first comment he’d made about anything we were removing. Even when we’d dragged out his mother’s bed he hadn’t cracked open like this. “She liked photography.”

I thought of the blank walls in her living room, the seeming contradiction of an art enthusiast who didn’t hang any art. All I could think to say was, “I didn’t know that.”

I opened the vanity cabinet drawers and plucked out the drain cleaner and backup washcloths heaped beneath the sink’s twisty pipe. Burkhardt held out the box and we tossed things in until the cabinet was empty except for the wispy spiderwebs in the corners. I stood and Burkhardt shut the box. We moved into the kitchen next, and with some newspapers that he’d brought along we started wrapping glassware.

“You thought of everything,” I said.

“I’ve done this before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

We were sitting at the tiny table crammed into the small eating nook, Burkhardt facing the empty living room, me the sliding doors leading outside. The god box was to my right. Burkhardt still hadn’t said a word about it, and I wasn’t sure why this bothered me. He’d certainly seen it; the only other things on the counter were the candles and a knife set, the latter of which he’d plopped into a box right away, securing each knife to the block with a stipple of tape.

Burkhardt scratched at his throat alongside his Adam’s apple. He needed a shave; a thin scrim of hair had spread across his chin and down his neck, toward the collar of his t-shirt. His eyes were baggy.

“I’ve packed up and moved like three times.”

“I don’t think this is quite the same thing.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s not.”

Without a word he stood and headed upstairs. I followed him. We grunted and cursed and dragged out the rest of the big stuff. We manhandled his mother’s bathroom; he threw away a bunch of cosmetics. I felt like he should slow down or reconsider but I said nothing. He found a cabinet full of paperwork, tax returns, health insurance information. He didn’t bother looking through them: straight into a garbage bag. With every handful Burkhardt threw away he gained more steam. He was a whirlwind of discarding, of decision-making. When we reached his mother’s jewellery – necklaces and earrings and bracelets still in a messy heap in a slick, velvet-lined box – he scooped a hand into it like he was thrusting his fingers into sand.

“I always wanted to do that. She didn’t ever let me.”

“Oh.”

“The metal feels nice. Cold.”

“What do you want to do with it?”

“It’s all costume. She couldn’t afford the real thing.” He tossed it into the trash bag I was carrying. The clot of metal weighed down the bag like an anchor. This, of all things, made my arms tired – incapable of any more heavy lifting even though there was plenty left to do.

MY MOTHER’S CONDITION STEADIED OUT. The steroids and immunoglobulin reduced her muscle spasms and eased some of the stiffening in her joints, but doctors wouldn’t say she was getting better. There was no real return to normal, though no one would say this out loud. She became stuck in a state of not-well-but-not-worse.

For a while, I thought about starting my own god box. But any time I’d try to sit down and write, I had no words. Everything felt stoppered up. Holding a pen in my hand felt foreign, as if my fingers and brain didn’t know what to do. As soon as I would give up, I would know exactly what I might write, but then if I would sit back down, nothing would come out. It was like a terrible comedy sketch, something Abbott and Costello would leave on the cutting room floor. So eventually I gave up, and I said nothing about anything to anyone.

WHILE BURKHARDT TOOK THE BAG to the dumpster, I wandered back toward the kitchen as if called by the god box. It was made of some kind of cardboard, thin but sturdy, the surface pebbly and uneven like a popcorn ceiling.

“Oh, that.”

I hadn’t heard Burkhardt come back. He was staring at my hands, which were perched on the sides of the box as if I was about to play it like a piano.

“You know what it is?” I said.

He shrugged.

“I’m not sure if that’s a yes or a no.”

“I don’t know what’s in there.”

I pulled my hands back from the box. “Do you want to?”

Burkhardt blinked down at the counter. He reached out but instead of touching the box he picked up one of the LED candles. I thought for a second he might start juggling it as he cupped it in his palms.

“Do you think I should?”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I really be the one to answer that?”

He looked at me. Burkhardt had a dense face, features crowded on a plane too small for them: big brown eyes, nearly cartoonish; long, aquiline nose that drifted slightly to the left; full lips that were often dry so he was always licking at them; small forehead with a thick hairline close to his eyebrows. Individually, the pieces shouldn’t have been beautiful, but set together they somehow were – attractive in their strange composition. He set the candles down and stood on the other side of the countertop in front of the god box so that we were surrounding it like a pair of cultists about to perform a ritual sacrifice. He placed his hands on the sides of the box.

“Did I ever tell you what she said when I came out?”

I shook my head. Even though we’d known each other for a long time, we’d always kept parts of us tucked away from one another. He’d been my freshman-year roommate at our little liberal arts college in northern Missouri. Burkhardt and I kept discovering things that we had in common, from the weirdly specific – we both ran cross-country as high school freshmen but quit after one year; our dads were both pieces of shit that had skated out on our moms when we were kids – to vague similarities – we both loved black-and-white movies and sports that no other teenagers around us cared about (he tennis and me volleyball) – and these drew us close enough that we lived together all four years, moving off campus as juniors.

One thing we had never shared were the stories of our mothers. They were – at least his was to me and vice versa – shadows lurking behind their sons, a cavern of untold tales and explanations, roots and histories. My mother sent me handwritten letters all through college rather than calling on the phone, mostly because, in her mind, there was nothing better than a mailbox laden with something other than bills and weekly circulars. Over the course of four years Burkhardt never asked to read them, and I didn’t make a habit of keeping them: there was no secret stash, no god box of my own stuffed in a closet nor on display in my kitchen. But he knew I received them, that she and I got along. I knew nothing about his mother, a woman he mentioned even less than his father.

Burkhardt sucked in a long breath. “I was seventeen and had just come home from my first high school party. I’d only had two beers but I felt drunk. Loose. That kind of elated drunk, you know, where everything’s nice, warm?”

I nodded.

“She’d waited up for me, as I knew she would. She always did. She asked me how my night had been and the first thing that came out was, ‘I kissed Danny Columbine in a bathroom.’”

“I remember you telling me that story. About Danny Columbine.”

“My first kiss.”

“And your mom said?”

“She said, ‘Good for you. Danny Columbine seems nice.’”

“Was she right? Was Danny Columbine nice?”

“Not really,” Burkhardt said. “He didn’t ever talk to me again.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, he purposefully ignored me. I think he thought I would tell people or that they’d talk. He was a jock. Football. Maybe baseball. Or maybe both.”

“Swoon-worthy.”

“He had a cheerleader girlfriend. On-and-off girlfriend.” Burkhardt shrugged, then his gaze went far away. I imagined he was seeing himself, or Danny Columbine, or his mother, or maybe all three of them, years ago, when things were different.

“It was just another teenage tragedy,” Burkhardt continued. “Who knows? Maybe he’s, like, working for the Trevor Project or something. Or maybe he has half a dozen kids and is unhappily married.”

“The only two possibilities.”

Burkhardt nodded. Then, without any fanfare whatsoever, he lifted open the box.

RIGHT BEFORE she had to move into assisted living, my mother asked me to get her god box. She could hardly wrap her hand around doorknobs, much less raise her arms high enough over her head to pull things down from the shelves that loomed high above her.

She had never given the box a name. We had not spoken about it, even though I’d seen her writing and had imagined her, late at night, sitting at her writing desk, body hunched, hand precise as she scribbled out her dreams and regrets, her wants and wishes, which I only understood to be what she was doing when I later googled what a god box was.

The box itself was plain, hefty. The edges were sharp. It was canary yellow, blazing like a small sun. I resisted the urge to open it. My mother stood behind me in her bedroom; the box had been sitting on a high shelf in her closet. I had no idea how she’d managed to get it up there in the first place. I turned to her and held it out like a communion offering. She took it in both hands, barely able to hold it. I shut the closet door and slid around her so I could leave the room. I don’t know how long she was in there or what she did with the contents. After she moved into the assisted living home, I found the box on her nightstand. I didn’t allow myself to open it, no matter how much it called to me.

BURKHARDT STARED DOWN into his mother’s box. I thought about my house, picturing his mother’s things there, and felt a tight pang at the fact that it would be her couch, rather than my own mother’s, joining my living room. Her armoire, her chairs. When he asked if he could store her things there, I should have told him no, that I needed that space for my mother’s things, but that would have meant admitting that she wasn’t ever going home.

Finally, Burkhardt dipped a hand inside the box. He plucked out a slim stack of notecards, the lined kind that students use to study. I could see his mother’s slanted handwriting, formal and calligraphic. I watched Burkhardt squint at the ink and then laugh.

“It’s a recipe for banana bread.” He set it down. “I don’t think I ever saw her bake.” He read the next one. “Chicken Kiev. She didn’t cook, either.”

“Are you sure she wrote them?”

“It’s her handwriting.”

He shuffled through a few more. All recipes for things Burkhardt had never eaten, at least not as prepared by his mother. When he reached the last of the notecards, he heaved out a sigh and then shook his head. “You’d have thought there’d be something more important in here.”

“Was there something you hoped to find?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Please don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make this mean more than it does.”

“I didn’t think I was doing that,” I said.

“I know you didn’t. But you do that sometimes.”

Burkhardt placed the index cards back in the box. He picked up the box and gestured for me to follow him outside. He walked past the moving truck. I knew where he was headed.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said.

The complex was off the frontage road to the interstate, and I could hear the low hum of cars zipping by, semi-trucks rattling down the asphalt. Somewhere, someone was grilling, the tart smell of charcoal and lighter fluid lilting in the air.

“But you want to?”

We reached the dumpsters at the far end of the complex. I could smell rotting fruit and scuzzy meats. I could picture the garbage we’d tossed inside already, fat and heavy atop discarded plastic bottles and cinched-up baggies of cat litter. The oozy smell made my eyes water.

Without opening the gate, Burkhardt heaved the god box like a discus, right over the fencing. I heard it land pillow-soft against the bags. He turned on his heels and slapped his hands as if ridding them of grime and started walking back toward the truck, the townhouse, the little table in the eating nook with its two chairs and the fallen cigarette butts. I wanted to say something, for there to be something meaningful about what Burkhardt had done, but I could think of nothing. All I could picture was his mother’s slanted handwriting, those mysterious recipes, forever stuck in the dark of that box, never to be read or rendered into dishes. I thought about my own mother’s box, what I might find there someday when I finally brought myself to look. I wondered what it would take for me to do that, and my mind went blank, paralyzed by the possible futures awaiting me.