Upside (Down)

When things stopped making any sense at all, he turned the furniture upside down. She came home and tried to rest on the canted underside of the sofa, then perched on the peak of a chair to stare at him in his pyjamas, his bowl of cereal balanced on a table leg.

“Your cereal’s upside down,” she said.

The next day, while she was at work, he super-glued the furniture to the ceiling. He glued the box spring to the frame, stuck the legs to the ceiling and lashed on the mattress with bungee cords. He sewed cushions and throw pillows onto the sofa and wrestled it up the ladder. He glued the spices into the spice rack and put that up, and the glasses and cutting board above where they’d lain on the counter, a potted plant, its roots wrapped in burlap, the shampoo in the shower and the coffee table with its books glued down and their covers dangling open. The bookshelves, the armchair, the kitchen table and the dishrack, the desk in the bedroom and the carpet in the living room arranged into a second, inaccessible apartment hanging a few feet above their heads.

“Why?” she asked. “Why would you do that?”

“Things are clearer this way. Now the bed is just a bed, not just the place where we sleep, talk, have sex, try, you know. The table is itself, and not anything else. Get it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Take it down. Please.”

Instead, he glued her to the ceiling. She bit and lashed and waved her feet around every time they came close to sticking. “Goddamn it! How would you like it if I tried to glue you somewhere?” In the end he had to tie her hands bind her legs to broomsticks, take off her shoes and dip them in glue, then quickly tie them on and press her feet to the ceiling.

Then he sat on the floor leaning up against the wall and studied her. She looked more like herself, furious, hair standing up and her breasts under her chin. Her arms kept raising down on him, as if to say Here I am, or, with her face tilted open, to embrace a buried sky.

Now that she couldn’t work, he had to get a job, but he kept getting laid off because he had to rush home every day during lunch to feed her. He cut and sewed buttons into her pantlegs, and in the mornings he would take off her clothes, wash her with hot, soapy water, and bring outfits from the closet for her to choose from. He would wash, dry and brush her hair, hold the mirror and pass her lipstick, eyeshadow, blush, mascara. If she wanted to watch TV at night, he turned the TV upside-down and watched it with her. When it was time for bed, he would put on her pyjamas, wrap her in blankets and fasten them with safety pins, and sleep on the floor underneath her.

Then, one day, when things stopped making any sense at all, she took off her shoes. When he came home for lunch that day, there were her red sneakers, glued to the ceiling, the laces untied for the first time in years and in the dust, small, moist footprints where she’d walked across the ceiling and out the door.