The Warehouse Disaster
by Patrick W. Gallagher
My Dear Sister,
I admit this much: I should never have left my nephew, your son, alone in our family’s warehouse. That fact is not in dispute, by me least of all. Not that he actually was alone, however. The entire warehouse staff was there, too; it was only that I, his uncle and the only official Manager in the warehouse, was not in the warehouse with him at the time.
As I set foot in the warehouse that fateful day—my heart between my tonsils, my eyebrows in my scalp—I beheld your son’s grin and remembered, as you so often have reminded me, that the young man is and always has been radically evil. Not because of the extent of his evil, but because, as Kant says, he has the insight to know what is good but also the power of free will not to follow that star, by his own choice. And in that important sense, he is no different than any other person—your son is just like any other person, myself especially. Just a little bit more so.
You would have both recognized him and also not. You know the front door to our warehouse—our family’s biggest warehouse!—how it creaks. I stood no more than a single step beyond the threshold, my mouth agape and my palms clammy, watching your son—my nephew—loping toward me, both hands snapping fingers in unison, as the creak of the door evaporated into the cavernous warehouse space. He snapped his fingers, he grinned with his mouth open, he licked his lips.
I had never before fully appreciated the fitness of your son’s body: he arched his spine, pointing to the distant warehouse ceiling with his alert tongue, his shirt pulling up an inch or two above his waist so I could view his marble-smooth abdominal muscles. Then, he clapped his hands a single time and I observed the young man wore sunglasses even though there was no natural light. A picture of Dionysian youth at the zenith of its cruel beauty.
It was my regrettable notion to give your son a job at the warehouse after he took a break from college. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course. But in the days and weeks to come, there may be people of different stripes coming forward to tell you I had appointed Billy Sandwich, your son, to the position of Manager in the warehouse. All lies! I was and remain the one and only Manager in the warehouse; not a single one of these people—not the janitor, not the email clerk, nor the receptionist or a single one of our physical laborers—will be able to cite a single word from my own mouth where I told them Billy was the Manager or even the Acting Manager. I am the Manager in the warehouse, to this day, and therefore my word alone confers the right to issue managerial decrees upon others.
Just as the Sandwich family has assembled every winter and summer solstice for all of our generations, without exception, there is no exception to my authority in the warehouse.
So why did the warehouse employees obey Billy? Why did they not simply throw up their limp arms at the sound of his orders and say, laughing, “Silly Billy, you are not our Manager!” Why indeed.
It is a mystery that we may never understand. Billy, instead of playing Nintendo in the office, ventured out—in my absence, for as you know I was not anywhere near our warehouse at that time—and he told them to rearrange everything. He told them, forget everything you know about this warehouse, forsake every word you have ever heard from me, the Manager in the warehouse. Ignore the shrieking call of the conscience or even simple common sense in your own head. Pay no heed to any of that, Billy told the workers, and move all of the items in the warehouse into a big, disorganized pile in the middle of the enormous space.
And they did it! Knowing full well that Billy is not and most certainly never will be Manager in the warehouse, they moved all of the items in the warehouse into a towering mound, even the fragile ones like the glass coffee tables. An incomprehensible act of human stupidity, an enigma as unfathomably murky as the abyss of intergalactic space . . .
. . . Except there is the undeniable fact of Billy’s family name. Here in Massachusetts, I hardly need to regale you of the shadow it casts. You were the one, after all, who chose to record music and tour without the benefit of calling yourself a Sandwich, despite all the instant recognition that name confers, especially among fans of classical music. The first Sandwich to break bread upon these rocky shores, the legendary Earl himself, said as much in his historic pamphlet, “Two Slices of Bread Cannot My Liberty Enclose”: to be a Sandwich is to be seen by common folk as a leader, right or wrong.
This is not to say that your son abused his privilege. The answer there is a question of motive: why did he wait until I, the Manager, was out of the warehouse, and then demand of the warehouse staff that they move all of the goods neatly stacked in the warehouse row upon row into a pile in the middle of the floor? Did he know how wrong it was? Did he know it would have ripple effects that would do pernicious harm upon our warehouse’s relationships with many other companies?
I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.
My feelings when I saw the pile, though? They were horrible. It started with ominous sounds: since I was not in the warehouse when the pile was made, I heard cracks and crashes from a block or so away and thought, maybe those are coming from the direction of the warehouse, but they could not possibly be coming from the warehouse itself. No one there is allowed to make big, decisive moves without the Manager’s explicit permission, I reasoned. And I, the Manager, was not in the warehouse at that time. But still I felt dread: not because there was any reason why I should have known that the warehouse was under threat, but instead just because I care so much about the warehouse that it makes me feel anxious sometimes. I really want the warehouse to thrive.
As long as we are on the subject of fear: dear sister, you well know that the pride all Sandwiches feel in our illustrious family name is like the kiln in which a fresh loaf of bread rises: its fire is to be dreaded as much as it is to be celebrated. Our family portrait—the small family portrait, I mean, of just you, me, Papa and Mama, and the yellow dog—still adorns the grotto wall beneath the Worcester estate.
You remember the day the yellow dog’s ears were painted over our brother’s portrait, right?
I know you do because it was only one day thereafter that you stopped using the Sandwich name to promote your career as a cellist. You decided to hedge your bets against the perception of any failure, lest you drag the Sandwich name through the mud like the yellow dog did. You didn’t want to cry like he did while all of us—not the small Sandwich family but the big one, all the cousins and aunts and uncles and babies and wheelchair-bound mummies—all of us watched Uncle Powers paint yellow strips over our brother’s human ears, the brush caressing the grotto walls up and down in mustard yellow. The unhurried languor in Uncle’s wrist was equal only to the spite in his grin as the ears of the yellow dog eclipsed those of the human man on the rough grotto granite.
This is the Sandwich way: because the yellow dog lost so much money and became so notorious in the Charles Keating Savings and Loan scandal, he is no longer our brother. He is our pet, our yellow dog, never again to be called by his given name. He sullied the reputation of the Sandwich clan before our social inferiors, and so a mere pet of the Sandwiches shall he remain.
He still has a human body and a human face, but can you even see them? When I look at him, all I see are his yellow ears in the grotto, and then I look away as fast as I can. When was the last time you heard his human voice? When the judgment comes, it is swift and final.
You should not have feared the same fate. Even if you had gotten bad reviews and failed to sell concert tickets as a cellist, no one would have accused you of acting in bad faith. Bad faith is a prerequisite to loss of human status within the family, every Sandwich knows as much.
You should not have feared the harshest punishment for failures that never took place, but you were right to do so all the same. Uncle Powers is the de facto head of the family and his affinity to wield the lash is well known.
I can no sooner imagine you, of such impeccable poise, grace, and accomplishment, subject to the same fate as the yellow dog, as I can imagine . . . What? I never imagined our brother on all fours, his collared neck at the end of a leash clenched in Uncle Powers’s fist, eating ground meat out of a bowl, until I first saw it at our family’s winter solstice affair some five years ago.
I have seen it twice every year since then, in the winter and the summer, but still I remember the shock.
If I were to see that happen to you, my world would no longer make sense.
That was what I felt when I saw the pile: this does not make sense. Crates cracked and splintered, the glass of TV monitors shattered and sparkling in the utilitarian fluorescent light, the heads and limbs of dolls and action figures grasping out of the mound like the bodies of drowned swimmers. In one second, I would observe the distinct shape of a recognizable object with a purpose and an identity: a vacuum cleaner, a stylish black leather swivel chair, a case of canned tomatoes. And in the next second, over and over, the same thing always happened: I lost sight of that particular tree and beheld the dark forest as a whole, the horror of absolute chaos.
I mentioned earlier that as your son approached me he arched his back and showed off his abs. Before he did that, he untucked his shirt and lit a cigarette. He lifted up one knee and then another. He put his finger to his forehead and winked at me like I had forgotten something. But I had forgotten nothing.
It is taboo in our family for senior members to sacrifice the young. You recall the legend of our Great Grand Aunt Gladys; her portrait was painted over, she was made the orange cat, because she mendaciously blamed her daughter for her own prolific acts of stealing. There will be a discussion soon, and you will be part of it—likely when the small families reconvene with the big family this summer solstice—about how this “warehouse disaster” is to be dealt with.
The question will turn me to me. And you, dear sister, will have a vote.
I am not asking you to sacrifice your young son’s life for my protection. Hardly. Billy is still mostly an adolescent, in my opinion a potential fashion model, and his mind is as free as the breeze. His portrait has not yet been painted in any of our family’s grottoes—and therefore, unlike me, he has no portrait to be painted over.
Your son has little to lose. Uncle Powers may even let him off with a simple warning. By contrast, Uncle Powers once whispered to me that if I ever were to sully the family name, I would not even be repainted as a cat or a dog, but as a hamster or gerbil. A blue hamster or gerbil, he said. He declared he would build a giant wheel for me to run on, nude, in front of the whole big family at every solstice gathering. Uncle Powers was drunk, laughing uncontrollably, but it’s as they say—in vino veritas.
If I am held responsible for the warehouse disaster, the amount of loss I will suffer will not be proportionate. I have standing, a reputation as a warehouse Manager, and a young girlfriend who is still naive about the ways of all great families (including her own—the Proudwhites). Your bond with your son is paramount to your essence, this I know; yet I also know that I was not in the warehouse when Billy ordered the staff to move everything in the warehouse into a violently disordered pile in the center of the cavernous space, nor did I encourage him to do it in any way. I was out of the building, returning a library book as a favor to an acquaintance!
Days before the warehouse disaster, I saw Billy in a nearby alley. I could not see who was next to him, but I discerned a rotund shadow projected on the wall beside him. In hindsight, I believe that whosever silhouette that was, that unknown person may have played a role in inspiring Billy to move all of those precious goods into a pile.
I believe that if the worst were to happen to Billy, things would still not be so terrible for him. He would be a prized pet, like an exotic golden parrot, not a rodent like me. I would insist that Uncle Powers give him a beautiful golden cage with a swing for him to do acrobatics on, at the solstices, with his wonderful, lithe, muscular body. Billy has the toned, lean muscles of a dancer, as I’m sure you’ve observed.
I can conclude only as follows: when the time comes to assign blame for the warehouse disaster, please do not vote for me. I gave no permission to move anything into a pile, much less everything. In this life, where so many things happen that just don’t make any sense at all, how can anyone blame anyone for anything?
Patrick W. Gallagher‘s stories and essays have appeared in Gawker Review of Books, n+1, The Adirondack Review, The New York Times, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and more, and from 2009 – 2020 he was host of The Farm, NYC’s reading series destination for the newest and best satirical and/or critical writing in any genre. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and a JD from Brooklyn Law School.