Contents May Have Shifted During Transport

My name is Lorenzo and I want to say first, for the record, as they say on the forms, the information provided above is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, that I did not always talk this way. I talk this way now because the talking had to come from somewhere, and where I lived, for nine years, the somewhere was the ground.

You learn language the way you learn anything when nobody is teaching you on purpose: by what's left over. I did not have a school. I had the alley behind the Russo's on Fairview, and the dumpster outside the Walgreens that always smelled like glue and orange peel, and the recycling bins behind the medical building where the paper still had warmth to it sometimes, like it remembered being inside. I read what came to me. A cereal box does not know it is teaching a man grammar. A cereal box just sits there saying NOW WITH 30% MORE FIBER and a man sits there too, and after enough years the man starts to think in those rhythms, because those are the only rhythms anybody gave him for free.

I want to be exact about something, because exactness is the one thing the streets did teach me, even if they taught it through warning labels: KEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME. DO NOT PUNCTURE OR INCINERATE. I did not choose this voice. This voice is what accumulates in a man who has spent a decade reading the only books available to him, which were not books, which were the instructions on how to assemble a bookshelf from IKEA, and the back of a Tylenol bottle, and a flyer for a Baptist church soup kitchen that said GOD HAS NOT FORGOTTEN YOU in letters big enough to be read from a moving car, which I appreciated, because most of what people said to me on the street was said from a moving car, or not said at all.

Here is what I want to tell you, and I am going to tell it the way I learned to tell anything, which is in pieces, because that's how it came to me — in pieces, torn, water-stained, half a sentence on one page and the rest blown three blocks away.

PIECE ONE: WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL IS BROKEN.

I had a wife. This is true, and I do not say it for sympathy, I say it because the form asks for an accurate history and a man should fill out his own form honestly even if no one is checking it. Her name was Denise and we were married for six years in a town in Ohio I am not going to name, and the seal between us broke the way a seal breaks, which is to say slowly, with stress fractures nobody points a flashlight at until the whole thing comes apart in your hands. I will tell you the truth: I do not entirely understand what broke it. I have read a hundred labels since then trying to find the language for it and I have not found one yet that says NET CONTENTS MAY SETTLE DURING SHIPPING in a way that explains a marriage, though I think that label comes closer than most things the counselors at the shelter tried to give me, with their pamphlets, their FEELINGS WHEEL, their circle of words that all sounded like they were translated from a country I'd never visited.

PIECE TWO: SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.

After Denise, I want to say I assembled myself, but that would be a lie, because some assembly was required and I did not have all the parts, and some of the parts I did have, I lost. There was a period — I am not going to dress it up — where I drank the kind of drink that comes with its own warning, GOVERNMENT WARNING: ACCORDING TO THE SURGEON GENERAL, WOMEN SHOULD NOT DRINK ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES DURING PREGNANCY, which never applied to me directly, being a man, but which I read so many times off so many discarded bottles that it started to feel like it was talking to me anyway, like a label can address a man even when its instructions are meant for somebody else, the way I think a lot of religion works, if I'm honest, and I am trying to be.

I lost the job. I lost the apartment after that, in the order you'd expect, the order printed right there on every eviction notice I ever found taped to a door that wasn't mine: FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN FURTHER ACTION. I always thought that was a strange way to write a threat — further action — like the world was being polite about it even while it put you out on the sidewalk. I have noticed that the worst things that happen to a man are often announced in the gentlest paperwork. Nobody writes DESTROYED on the form. They write TERMINATED. They write NOTICE OF NON-RENEWAL. I have read enough of these now to tell you that bureaucracy is just grief wearing a tie.

PIECE THREE: DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY.

I want to talk about the library, because the library is where the pieces started to come together into something more than pieces, even though I did not go there to read, at first. I went there because it was warm, and because the chairs did not ask me to leave the way a bench does, eventually, once a cop decides the bench has had enough of you. I sat in the library on Centre Street for four winters before I picked up an actual book, and the first one I picked up was not a novel, it was a manual — Operating Instructions and Parts List, Model 220 — for a piece of equipment I will never own and have never seen, and I read the whole thing front to back because it was sitting on the table and nobody told me I wasn't allowed, and somewhere in the middle of reading about torque specifications for a bolt I will never touch, I understood, for the first time in maybe a decade, that language could build something instead of just telling you what you'd lost.

I do not know how to explain this except to say that a sentence like TIGHTEN BOLT B TO 35 FT-LBS BEFORE PROCEEDING TO STEP 4 contains, inside it, a small and total kind of hope. It assumes there will be a Step 4. It assumes you are the kind of man who proceeds.

I started reading everything after that. Not novels, not at first — those felt like they belonged to people who'd had a different life, people who'd been handed the right early pieces and assembled correctly the first time. I read what I knew: the labels, the forms, the flyers, the safety data sheets I found in the recycling behind the auto shop, the CAUTION: CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE stamped on a can of something that exploded once, two feet from my head, in a dumpster outside a hair salon, and taught me more about consequence in one second than six years of sermons had.

PIECE FOUR: THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE, OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE.

I want to say something about my son, who I have not seen in eleven years, and who would be nineteen now, old enough that if he walked past me on the street he would not recognize the man holding the sign, and I would not recognize him either, except maybe in the shape of his shoulders, which were starting to look like mine the last time I saw him, when he was eight, eating a popsicle on a porch that was not my porch anymore.

I do not have the right words for this, even now, even after everything I have taught myself off the back of a thousand boxes. I have looked. I have read every label I could find hoping one of them would have the sentence I needed, the way you read the side of a medicine bottle hoping it'll finally say the thing that fixes you, and what I have found instead, over and over, on bottle after bottle, is this: THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE, OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. And I have come to think that is the truest sentence I own. Nothing I have read, no label, no form, no flyer, no government warning, has cured anything. I do not think that was ever what language was for. I think I believed, for a while, that if I read enough of it, accumulated enough of it, I could build a sentence sturdy enough to hold the weight of what happened to me and Denise, and to my son, and to the nine years between the eviction notice and this library chair I am sitting in now, writing this on the back of a donated legal pad, in pencil, because pens are the first thing that go missing from a shelter.

But a label does not cure. A label just tells you, honestly, what it cannot do, and lets you decide for yourself what to do with the rest of it.

PIECE FIVE: KEEP THIS DOCUMENT FOR YOUR RECORDS.

I am fifty-one years old. I have a caseworker now, a woman named Patricia who does not flinch when I talk the way I talk, who told me once that I "speak in found language," which I did not understand as a compliment until I thought about it for a few days, the way I think about everything now, slowly, the way you read a contract you don't want to sign too fast.

I am not going to tell you I have fixed myself, because I have read enough product labels to know that nothing fixes anything, not really, not all the way — there's no 100% SATISFACTION GUARANTEED on a human life, no fine print that lets you return nine years for a full refund. What I have is this: a voice, built entirely out of what other people threw away, which I did not choose and would not have chosen, but which is, at the end of all of it, mine. I did not get the early pieces. I did not get the assembly done correctly the first time, or the second, or possibly the third. But I want it on the record, the way the forms always ask for it on the record: I am still proceeding. I have tightened what I could to the proper specification. I am still, against every instruction printed on every box I have ever read, attempting Step 4.