Charulata Sinha
Waste Collectors
Excerpt
No one thought much of it when the garbage men went on strike. They had a list of twenty demands pinned to every signpost and streetlamp. Later I would learn that it was a city-wide effort, but at the time, I thought it was local to my neighborhood. One demand was bolded and italicized: We prefer to be called waste collectors. I supposed this was valid in the same way prostitutes prefer to be called sex workers. Both groups wanted to do away with euphemisms and get down to the nitty-gritty: we collect waste; we have sex. Everyone in my building figured it would all be resolved quickly. My landlord assured us these man-babies would cave for the right number. Mostly, people didn’t care about the waste collectors and their fledgling revolution. Evidently their demands weren’t met, because the flyers started multiplying on stoops and doorsteps, escaping their paperweights tenfold and fluttering in the breeze like many-winged birds. And then there was the trash.
Piles of trash, abandoned on every street corner. Big, black-tar garbage bags down to tiny takeout boxes littered the sidewalk, spilling out of bulging bins. All manner of filth, strewn across the concrete, baked in the summer sun: fish heads, milk jugs, moldy bread, tampons, cheese rind, mattresses, an entire toilet, prescription painkiller bottles, curtains, empty soap dispensers. Odd things. Things that used to be whisked away and sunk. After, I thought a lot about what a comforting bit of sorcery that was. What charitable magic the garbage men used to make of the trash, to disappear it. Now the trash sat gross and naked in the accusing light. Every piece was a tiny ghost. It was impossible to escape these reminders of what you had used or not used, but, in any case, had thrown away.
That first week, it was summer. The sun was insistent. The light would glint off the garbage, sparkling and burning. It hurt to look at it. The smell alone; street hawkers began selling nose-plugs. People walked around with scarves wrapped around their faces, so you could only see eyes, scanning for trash heaps, watering from the fumes. Think about if your smelliest pair of socks or shorts or whatever was large enough to cradle an entire island in its girth. Now, think about going grocery shopping in that clammy, yeasty biodome. Think about three million people and think about that insistent sun and also the sweat. This is what it smelled like.
The mayor released a spineless statement. Something about the concerns of the garbage men being heard, some plan in place for city workers to sweep up the trash. Soon after his office was swarmed with garbage. Protestors stormed city hall, heaving their Glad bags of trash through the heavy windows, blocking the entry and exit ways, setting off the fire alarms, which then set off the sprinklers, which then sprayed tinny water on the trash, which made it soggy and solidified and even more impossible to circumnavigate. Those poor civil servants in that building. This was probably when the first undocumented death occurred. We didn’t hear from the mayor after that. The remaining city workers quietly quit their jobs. No one wanted to take care of the trash. It was already filling the streets, pouring into parks and highways and every inch of public space. It became impossible to drive a car. People deserted them in the streets, and they too would fill with garbage, stale noodles decorating the headlights, plastic cups pressed up against windows. The garbage men were somewhere laughing. Think for a moment about the professions we consider most valuable. Neurosurgeon, maybe. But what do we stand to lose if all of the neurosurgeons stop doing their jobs? A couple thousand lives, tops. Probably your grandmother. Sad, but workable. What we stood to lose if the garbage men stopped doing their jobs—this is what we found out.
People tried staying indoors, holed up in their apartments, faces turned resolutely towards the hum of tired fans. Then we lost power. The trash had toppled the wires, destroying the electrical exoskeleton of the city, phone lines curving artfully out of their posts. The Internet disappeared not long after. Still, like children, we holed up in our tiny rooms high above the streets, which were, by this time, completely covered with a brown-red mass of filth, hardened, mold-like. But the garbage soon forced its way into every building, knocking down doors, squeezing people out of windows and onto fire escapes. The sheer force of the trash cannot be overstated. The garbage flood flung us out of our rooms and back into the streets. Those that didn’t escape their apartments were buried alive in the garbage, limbs sticking out of the plastic-cardboard-glass mishmash. This is how my brother died.
Crowds of people gathered in the streets, dumbfounded, all of us walking aimlessly on top of the trash, which was piled on the concrete about fifteen feet deep, forming a squishy but stable ground. I roamed for hours, unsure of what to do with myself. In most places, the trash had completely coagulated, so that you could walk on it like you would a beach or marsh. In some areas, though, the garbage melted into something more liquid than solid. In these cases, you had to swim, holding your breath, hoping a piece of plastic didn’t lodge in your throat. Enterprising young men built makeshift boats out of old bed frames and maneuvered them through these tricky spots like gondoliers in some warped Venice.
I met Henry while scavenging for a pair of shoes. I had lost mine to a trash rivulet. He handed me a pair of men’s dress shoes, fancy with soft interiors. For a time, we sat wordlessly on a pile of old picture frames, fishing spare goods out of the rubble. It could have been two hours or three days. A middle-aged Slovakian woman named Bubba joined us. She didn’t speak English and this absolved us of small talk. We slept in a row, curled like question marks around each other.
People constructed tiny forts out of sheet metal and cloth, families huddled inside. In this way tent cities popped up in the more populated of areas. They were no match for the angry rain that beat against us as summer slumped into fall. The rain filled even the most solid of trash heaps, so they wept a strange pus if stepped on. Children began to get sick, the babies crying loudly and angrily as the storm grew deeper and more Biblical. Thunder struck a particularly oily spot of old Chinese food and electrocuted everyone within a block radius. Eventually the babies stopped crying. I saw a toddler who had forgotten what food was chewing contentedly on a flip-flop.
Food was everywhere and nowhere. Mold grew on every surface. Each potential meal was covered in the stuff. Fruits and vegetables were long gone, disintegrated into soupy sludge. Eggs lay cracked open, bleeding yolk onto old TVs and heaps of office paper. Bread was unrecognizable, radioactive. Our best hope was nonperishables—cans of preserved corn, chewy crackers in bulk boxes. But even those were overrun with roaches. The roaches, I think, had undergone some sort of rapid Darwinian transformation, discovering that this was indeed the environment to which they were most aptly suited. They grew wilier, smarter, scarier. They developed huge pincers, and would hide in boxes of cereal and wait for us, daring. When they bit, they drew blood, and did not run away but simply hung on, lodged indefinitely, their glassy black backs hard and smooth against our skin. The rats, their stomachs distended and veiny, grew to the size of house cats. They lounged liberally in the middle of the street.
A new world order emerged from the trash. Tribes formed and warred. A favorite tactic was setting the garbage piles on fire. Sulfurous pillars of smoke marked the contested spots. Gormless, we stumbled headfirst into danger and each time extracted ourselves, sticky and panting.
About the Author
Charulata Sinha is a writer whose work has been featured in New York, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Rumpus, and Underwater New York, where this story was originally published.