Thanatos Moving

The moving company was scheduled to arrive at my new apartment to deliver my furniture. Actually, they had been scheduled to arrive three months earlier, then two weeks earlier. This company had proved less than competent in our history together. I was moving from Texas to Indiana, but serving an internship in Connecticut in the meantime. My plan had been to move my stuff to Indiana where it would stay in storage while I was in Connecticut. Then, when I returned to Indiana, I would find an apartment and move my stuff there. All this required from the movers was that they pick up all of my worldly possessions in Texas and deliver them to Indiana sometime during a two week window. “No problem,” they said. “It will be there in a week.”

A week later, they had not yet left Texas. They had not yet left Texas a week after that, either. I now had to be in Connecticut in two days. My father, still in Texas, went down to their facility and, to put it mildly, haggled with them until they agreed to store my stuff in Texas until the end of the summer. According to this new plan, I would call them when I had a place in Indiana, and they would deliver my things there.

Then came the deluge. Every summer, sometimes twice, southeast Texas becomes a lake. Water rains from the sky, saturating the swampy terrain, and taxing the bayou systems beyond capacity. The water usually subsides in within a day or two, but not everything survives. In this case, flood waters were higher than usual. So much higher that, when I turned on the t.v. in Connecticut, the local news led with the story of the Texas floods. The accompanying film clips showed the neighborhood where my movers were located.

My dad went over to the storage facility as soon as the streets cleared. “I’d like to see my daughter’s stuff,” he said. "To see what has been damaged." The manager gave him a blank stare. “Oh, that load is on its way to Indiana," she said. “Why?” asked my dad. “You were supposed to store it here, like we agreed.” “I don’t know,” the manager said, “They left over the weekend. I wasn’t here.”

Ten days later, the truck returned with a moldy and mildewing load of wet boxes and furniture that all belonged to me. They had made a wide tour of middle America, travelling from Texas to Minneapolis to Colorado and back. My parents heroically tried to salvage what they could, particularly the notes for my dissertation and my rather extensive library. The notes and books they saturated with Lysol, baked in the microwave, and blasted with hair driers until each page was toxic with radiation and disinfectants. The neighbors complained about the smell from the wet clothes that my parents had spread out in the sun in the backyard to dry. The cleaners just laughed when my father brought in the heap of reeking cloth, hoping that a professional could salvage my wardrobe. Everything textile or wooden was lost. Everything else remained in storage until September. The company refused responsibility for any damage, insisting that all losses were due to “An Act of God." "Acts of God" included their own role as the Mold and Mildew Angel of the Almighty.

On September 1st, I signed a lease on an apartment in Indiana. The week before I moved in, I had called the movers. “Yes,” they assured me, “The truck will be there on Saturday. It is leaving the lot right now.” “Yes,” they assured my dad, not an hour later, “The truck will be there Saturday. It is leaving the lot right now.” On Saturday the 1st, lease freshly signed, phone plugged in, I called the moving company. “No,” they told me, “That load has not left storage.” The load finally left Texas on the following Wednesday, only to arrive on the 11th.

Early on the 11th, I had tried calling the movers on their cell phone, as instructed, to find out at exactly what time they would be arriving. I just knew that, if I missed them, I would not see what was left of my furniture for another three months. As the events of the day unfolded, however, the hope of contacting anyone on a cell phone became impractical and even frivolous for anything but an emergency.

That night, I sat by the phone, hoping that nothing had happened, hoping that they would call, and desperately longing for my television or radio, both of which were (at least I hoped that they were) packed away in the back of that damn truck. The movers showed up at 9:00 pm. “Thank god,” I greeted them, more relieved that I would not have to bear them any longer once they had unloaded my belongings than out of any real concern for their well-being. “I tried to call you on your cell phone,” I said, “but with everything that has happened today, no one’s cell was working.”

“Oh, we forgot to charge the battery,” the head mover said. “What do you mean what has happened today?”