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Next morning James sat on the train as it whisked him
southwards through the Bronx and onto Manhattan Island.
He was by no means a natural commuter but the journey
gave him secret pleasure. There was always something
new to look at.
The train stopped at Harlem-125th Street station, the
last stop before Grand Central Terminal. In the sudden
hush James could hear the conversation from the row
in front.
"So I thought, why not?" a woman said. "I've
done all these college courses, and conventional therapy
is going, like, nowhere, and I want to do something
different and, y'know, I'm like, so not into boredom.
Not interested. Not," she stressed, "interested.
So I sat down and I invented a new kind of therapy."
"What is that?" inquired her companion. In
contrast to the woman, he was very thin and he spoke
very softly.
"What is it?" she yelled.
"Yeah," he whispered.
"What did I invent?"
"Yeah, what did you invent?"
She paused, as if wondering whether it was safe to
reveal her secret.
"Are you ready for this?" she asked.
"Uhuh."
"Are you ready?" Her voice was getting louder.
"Yeah."
"Are you sure?"
"What's the new kind of therapy that you invented?"
he asked.
James was intrigued by this nonsense. Listening to
snatches of conversation on the train was a recent hobby.
"Well," she began. "Here's what happened.
I took a look around the neighborhood and I said to
myself 'Deedee. What's the next big thing? What is the
next big thing?'"
She emphasized the word 'big', drawing out the vowel
as far as it would go.
"The next big thing," her companion repeated.
He was amazingly patient.
"What is the next big thing? I mean BIG. And I
looked around the neighborhood and I noticed all these
storage businesses."
"Storage?"
"Storage warehouses where people rent a room by
the month and store their stuff. So I thought 'What
do people do with all this storage? Why is storage a
big business all of a sudden? Where is this heading?'"
"Where is this heading?"
"Well, the way I figure it, people collect all
this crap, and then they realize they've collected all
this crap and they don't know what to do. They move
to a smaller apartment, maybe, and they can't fit all
the crap into the new place because it's smaller."
"Too much crap."
"Right," she agreed, happy that he'd understood
despite the complexity. "Too much crap. Way too
much crap."
"Way too much crap. So what do they do?"
"What do they do? What do they DO? They find storage.
They rent this little room for $120 a month and they
store the crap in it."
"That sounds OK if it's just a temporary thing."
"If it's just a temporary thing, right. But is
it temporary? Is it temporary? You ride the train, you
look out the window and see all this storage. You see
all these buildings that say STORAGE in red neon. How
temporary is it?"
"I don't know," he admitted.
"How temporary is it, honey?"
"I don't know."
"It is not fucking temporary. It is not fucking
temporary at all. It is fucking permanent, is what it
is."
Her companion thought about this for long seconds.
"Permanent."
"You better believe it."
He took another break to think. "Why?"
"Why?"
"Yeah, why?"
James began to have second thoughts about eavesdropping.
"Why?!!!" The girl was incredulous. "Because
of this. People fill the entire place up with crap until
they can't take it any more. Then they put up with it
some more. Then they put up with it some more after
that, and then, one day, they say 'Fuck this', they
say 'I need some fucking storage.'"
"Right."
"And you know what they do?"
"They get some storage?"
"Right. They get some storage. They get some storage
and they move their stuff into storage, and they go
home, and they look at their place and they say, 'Hey,
this is cool.'"
"Because the place is cool," he added, pointlessly.
"And it's cheaper than getting a bigger apartment.
The place is cool and all the crap is in storage and
they don't have to see it and they don't have to walk
around it and they don't have to apologize and they
don't have to do nothing."
"Because of the storage."
"Because of the storage."
"And then they need therapy?"
She nodded vigorously. "No." Evidently that
would be too easy. "They don't need therapy right
then. They're gonna need therapy but they don't need
therapy right then. Maybe they needed therapy before
then, and they're gonna need it after then, but they
don't need it right then."
"Uhuh."
"What?"
"I said 'uhuh.'"
"Oh." She gave a rare pause for breath. "Well,
some time passes and their place begins to fill up with
more crap, and then more. You see where this is going?"
"No."
"They get more crap. More! They got rid of the
first load of crap and right away they begin to get
more crap because their place has enough space to put
it now. And more crap means more storage and more storage
means more crap and more crap means more storage.
"I understand," the man said.
"So what's the answer?' she asked.
He thought for a moment. "Less crap?" he
ventured.
"No!" she yelled at him.
"What then?"
"Think about it. They're trapped in this self-destructive,
denial-based, obsessive-compulsive situation and the
storage companies are, like, the enablers here. The
victim is spending more and more money on crap and more
and more money on storage. Eventually they're gonna
reach the situation where they don't even have enough
space to unpack all the boxes in storage and see what
they have. So they can't even throw out the crap unless
they throw out the whole lot of it, which they can't
do because it's their crap and they love it. This is
gonna be big. The storage companies will be like the
tobacco companies were in the 80s."
"So what's the answer?" The man was incredibly
slow.
"Storage therapy!" she screamed.
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