TP

By Matthew Heiti

Three-ply, two-ply—it didn’t matter. Premium, recycled, even the off-brand was fine, too. It could be sandpaper and my father would buy it as long as it was on sale. He’d take as many as the grocery store would allow, sometimes sneaking back during the evening shift, when a different clerk was working the cash, to get more. He would bring this harvest home, limping up the front steps under their pillowy weight, to tear into the packages like Christmas presents, stacking the rolls on top of each other in neat little rows until the bathroom cupboard was a swarming milky sea.

Some people collect stamps or coins or baseball cards—I was always partial to comic books, at least when I was a kid, going every Saturday morning to the little shack by the train tracks, to flip with my nose-picking fingers through smudged newsprint. I once dated someone who claimed to be a collector of other people, holding elaborate costumed parties where no one was permitted to leave until the sun rose, or later. And at one of these soirées, I met an accountant who collected tears, his own and others’—the ‘Keepings of Weepings’ he called it—storing them in little jars on a shelf above his bed.

Collections within collections, like nesting dolls. I knew someone who collected those, too.

My father, living his long small life, collected little except disappointment. Much of it mine. It mounded about his tumbling clapboard house like insulation, reeking of mothballs. Inside, there were no tchotchkes or knickknacks, curios or gimcracks—as a child I had not two whits of bric-a-brac to smash together in battle. But that did not mean our mouldering cupboards or shelves were bare—oh, no no—though I wish they had been.

My father, far from a rolling stone, gathered no moss, or anything else, except, that is, for his one true passion: toilet paper.

As a toddler with a burgeoning awareness, you take the reality within the four walls of your crib as the wider one. It’s only when you stop shitting your pants, and start flushing toilets in homes other than your own, flinging open strange washroom cupboards to discover a very reasonable, perhaps even dwindling, amount of toilet paper—only in that moment, do you start to wake to certain grown-up realities. Santa Claus has a fake beard, magic isn’t real, we have too much toilet paper.

Far far far too much.

I believe now my mother must have sheltered me from the sunbeam of his obsession. She would quietly recycle the coupons before my father saw them, hide spare two-fours in the basement behind the furnace, burning the excess in our backyard chiminea. She’d find elaborate uses for it—stuffing for parcels, garlands for trees—and she learned to make origami, folding entire rolls into napkin swans for the rare company who would dare visit.

Some families have deep dark secrets. We had toilet paper.

He never talked about it. He never responded to passive-aggressive comments, like I wish we had some room to store these hand towels, or even outright aggressive ones, like What’s with all this fucking toilet paper, Stan? He’d just bury his bent nose in his newspaper, rubbing the pages between thumb and forefinger, probably trying to guess the thread count.

One evening, she couldn’t stand it anymore, saying I can’t stand this anymore as she stood up from the risotto she’d so carefully prepared, stirring and simmering for hours, as she herself had simmered, for years of hours, until she’d gone volcanic.

My father said nothing, as his life—our lives—unravelled, much like toilet paper, before us. He hadn’t touched his risotto, too busy inspecting his latest addition to the collection—a quadruple-sized roll of some untold absorbency—through his jeweller’s loupe.

In the end, it probably wasn't the toilet paper, but what it represented, or what it didn’t represent—an absence, I mean.

There’s a hole in his heart, she’d told me later that night, coming to sit on the foot of my bed. A hole right through him. I used to think I could fill it, for years I tried, but it’s grown too big or I’ve grown too small. I don’t know.

I don’t either. As you grow (as I grew, limbs jutting out in all kinds of awkwardness) and get bigger (seeing more, knowing more and somehow far less)—as you look beyond your front door, your yard, your street—you recognize the big bleak vastness of the world. An absence you can never hope to fill.

Don’t try, she said, patting my feet, as if I could help it.

I heard the door shut downstairs. There was no slam, just a little puff of air, and she was gone for good. But that’s not how I remember it. How I see it, when I close my eyes, is her screaming, arms waving at me, as a tidal wave of white cottony down flushes her out to sea.

When you’re young, everything is ungraspable, until one day, suddenly, on your tippy-toes, at least something—the top shelf—is finally within reach. And on that shelf, grasping blindly about, you might find a key, as I did. On it was a bit of masking tape printed with my father’s childish block letters.

GARAGE, it seemed to say.

A mystical word—‘garage.’ My whole life, I had been forbidden from entry by the fist-sized padlock. Dangerous, my mother had warned, suggesting the sheen of sharp-edged tools: axes, knives, and hacksaws. The sagging structure glommed on to the rest of the house like an annoying younger sibling (of which I had none, as my parents were barely able to tolerate each other long enough to conceive me). We had a garage because everybody else in our suburban neighbourhood had one, and like all of them, we used it not to store cars, but secrets.

There are some things you were never meant to open, but you do anyway. With my mother gone, there was no one to protect me from my own curiosity. While my father was at work, out I crept, leaving bootprints through the soft white snow, key in hand. The garage door went up with a death rattle. And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, there were no tools—nothing to rake or manicure a lawn, or perform the much needed repairs on our house, or our lives. There was nothing in that vast space to serve any tangible purpose.

But it was far from empty.

There was no room for me to step further inside. They blocked my path: small shadows clustering, each a few inches high, in tidy rows and columns, end to end, stacked one on top of the other until they scraped the roof beams.

Toilet paper rolls, of course.

You could be forgiven for thinking this was just more of the same—like all the rest of my father’s collection of such sanitary tissue, filling up all the cupboards and corners of our house. What could be more sane and plain, after all, than toilet paper? The fancier brands might be embossed or embroidered, but, ultimately, the snowy squares are unwound until, each time, all you’re left with is the same naked cardboard tube—a husk to be pitched into the recycling bin.

This space, filled as it was—and yet, because of the hole bored through the centre of each roll, mostly full of emptiness—was not sane. In that garage, I found my father had never allowed a roll to become so unwound, not completely. Sheet by sheet, he had sloughed off, wiped up, and flushed down, yet, with a few squares remaining, the waning tissue about the thickness of a thumbnail, there he inexplicably stopped. Here, under lock and key, he had interred roll after withered roll, only to snatch another from the next pack and begin the whole process of undoing anew.

A graveyard would have a modicum of respect, and peace, but this was like walking in on a ward teeming with bodies on life support, staring fish-eyed into the dark.

My gasp was all it took—that sudden intake of air sending the first roll teetering, and then they all followed suit, like poor soldiers marching into an endless, hopeless war. Down they spilled in a great flood over top of me, washing out onto the snow, as if they might wrap its whiteness around themselves again.

How much toilet paper does someone use in a lifetime? How many rolls? It must be thousands. Thousands upon thousands, and hundreds of thousands of sheets altogether, but, for him, never all. Not a single roll fully finished. Not a one thrown out or recycled.

Why not? The question might drive you mad, as it drove my mother, out of her mind and out of our lives. It’s toilet paper. Why not use it up? Isn’t that what it was meant for, after all, to be used? Like us—to be used, to be loved dry—until we are ready to be put out to the curb.

Remember, though, my father was a collector. And what is a collection, if not something to be kept? Even the most disposable thing—toilet paper—even the most indisposed person (him, her, me) wants to be worshipped before they're gone.

It took me hours to stuff all those tubes back into the dark, dank space. I locked the garage up again, filled in my bootprints as best I could, walking backwards to the house, and returned the key to the shelf. I’m not sure if I did it to protect myself or him.

My father was not a violent man, despite the slow, cold abuse that seeped out of him. I think, now, that he tried his best to contain it. Most of the paper went to sop it up. But he had kept that last measure in reserve, stacked and stashed carefully in the garage. Perhaps had the cataclysm come—when it finally came for him last week, all alone in that mothballed clapboard house—he would have just enough time to gather up those mere sheets, the millions of them. A few seconds to wad them up between thumb and forefinger, one-ply, two-ply, three, and pack the hole—the exact diameter of a cardboard tube—in his heart.

I hope so.
​
There was no autopsy. Heart attack, the doctor said. But had she bothered to cut him open, cracked his ribcage, and split him wide, she’d have leaned down to find a tuft of ivory, growing from a hole in the left ventricle. As she watched, it would unfurl into the petals of a flower—a white origami rose—blooming up, upward, bursting out into the room, lifting her on a geyser of pure cotton up through the roof, carrying her (like he never could carry me or anyone) up above the big bleak vastness of the world, into the stars.

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​Matthew Heiti was born and lives still in a meteor crater in North Ontario. He is the author of The City Still Breathing (Coach House Books) and the playwright of Black Dog: 4 vs. the wrld (Playwrights Canada Press), and his latest novel, One Soft Infested Summer, is forthcoming with Latitude 46. His short stories have won the Carter V. Cooper Award and Grain Magazine’s short fiction prize. In his spare time, he is usually working.