Cave City Sink

I am excited to tell you that my first novel is going to be published next summer. I'll post more details when I have them, but for now I would like to say thank you for reading what I write. It is appreciated.

The summer after I graduated from college, I worked at a toy distribution warehouse in rural Kentucky. It was an enormous enclosed space, a cave of cinder block and steel. I would feel dizzy when I looked up into the darkness above me.

The majority of our orders were for items ordered in bulk. The most popular new plastic homes and plastic cars and realistic toy guns that made realistic gun sounds and shot nearly live rounds. These bulk orders were filled by men who drove little carts with little trailers trailing along behind. When a trailer was full, it would be dropped by a conveyor belt where young men would pitch the cases of puzzles and games onto a conveyor belt that led to the loading dock. As the men on carts pulled the bulk orders from the hundreds of shelves, shelves that stretched high into the darkness above us like beanstalks, the conveyor belt would sit idle, waiting.

At the distant end of the conveyor belt (or, I suppose, the beginning) were the toys that were not popular enough to be ordered by toy stores in bulk. Cheaper plastic, duller pink, educational. This is where I worked. At the end of the line, in the back corner of the massive enclosed space, my job was to put one toy at a time on a conveyor belt that didn't move for hours at a time.

The guy who worked on the other side of the line from me wore pressed Air Jordan t-shirts and called me "Paul" all summer, even though that is not my name. He sat in his pick-up truck at lunch and listened to music, his bass cannon audible inside. Every afternoon he complained of bowel trouble.

The belt would creep and carry our marbles away.

At lunch, I ate alone. Most of the other men, and they were all men, were in their forties, had dropped out of school as soon as they could, and had worked at the warehouse since it had opened sixteen years before. I remember when it was built. My father would drive my brother and I past it and tell us that he was responsible for the construction of this giant building full of toys. We begged to be let in to see them and he would say, At some point, I will let you in. Then my parents divorced and he moved away.

One day during lunch, one of the guys who drove the little carts sat next to me and said he could tell I was a reader. This was probably because I was reading. He was tall and thin and had shaggy brown hair. Thick glasses. A gold chain and shirt unbuttoned a few buttons. I like to read too, he said. He tried talking to me and I was polite, but generally wary of people being nice to me. If we are being generous, we could say I am shy. If we are being more true, we could say that I have a meanness in me that fears other people. So I tried, politely, to give him the cold shoulder.

Gregarious people, however, are usually unable to perceive cold shoulders and he kept talking to me all summer. One day he brought a book to work and gave it to me. I think you'll like this, he said. These are some of my favorite essays.

Generally, I do not read non-fiction. I don't much care what actually happened or what anyone actually thinks.

The book was falling apart, the pages pulled apart, the whole thing held together only by a red rubber band. Its cover laminated, like libraries do with paperbacks. The author's name glistened under bubbly plastic in garish red letters, embossed: Marion Spaulding. The Collected Essays Of. I'd never heard of this person before and looked at the guy blankly. You'll like it, he said. I took the book home and did not read it.

The rest of the summer I spent avoiding the friendly guy because he was too friendly. I even stopped eating lunch, choosing instead to stay by the conveyor belt with the toys under the high, hovering globe lights that swayed in the still undispersed dark above me. One afternoon he asked me if I wanted to go with him that weekend to a friend's house in Harrodsburg to see this friend's antique book collection. At that moment, I felt certain that this excursion would end with me dead and dismembered, slumbering for eternity beneath a cement floor, so I said I couldn't, quit the job, and moved to another town.

It wasn't until years later, when I moved to another state entirely, that I came across the battered collection of Spaulding essays again. It had burrowed to the bottom of a box of college books, just below Hesiod and Early Irish Sagas. Like many mass market paperbacks of a certain age, the edges of the pages were dyed bright yellow. It smelled like a cave smells.

This was in the spring, and I didn't have anything else pressing to read or do in my new state, so I thought that I would take a look at the book. I was outside, under an elm tree, sitting on a stained plastic chair, feet propped up over uncut grass, bare legs soaking up sunlight for the first time in an age.

There were seven essays, each exactly seventy pages long. From the description on the back of the book, each essay was on a different topic--education, darkness, childhood, murder, literature, cooking, and loss--but "Spaulding weaves each essay together in unexpected ways, creating a unified work of astonishing power, the wonder and vibrancy of thought radiating off of each page much like a city in flame." The description on the back of the book was a little purple, but it was hard not to get hyped up, especially at twenty-five.

I flipped through, reading the first few pages of a couple of the essays, and I really liked the way that it was written, what with really long sentences that braided together three or four ideas at a time, but what can I say, it was spring, the sky was electric in its emptiness and I got distracted by the distant sound of a band practicing in a garage and ended up setting the book down in the grass beside the small duplex that my wife and I, just married, had moved into and took a walk around the neighborhood until it rained and I ran back to the duplex, back inside to shelter, and forgot about Spaulding, which was, of course, still sitting outside, not battered and bloated by the elements and in all ways, ruined.

I've looked a few times for another copy at used bookstores, but have never seen it.