Sloth

by Judy Klass

Avery lay in bed with a sheet over his body. He watched the sheet rise and fall with his belly as he breathed. His belly was turning into a paunch: a hairy sack of guts. Some of the hairs around his belly button tickled against the sheet. His legs were hairy. There were tufts of hair on his toes. He stuck them out of the bottom of the sheet, so that he could admire them.

His room was a wreck. There were unwashed plates he had not found the energy to carry back to the kitchen. They weighted down several plastic trays on the floor. There was a large, half-closed, oily pizza box, with a few desiccated crusts in it. There were several fast-food clam shells, with crumbs, and crumpled paper and foil, and bits of their original contents spilling out. There were piles of dirty laundry – and the fetid room reeked of all of it. Of him. In his sad, jaded, fallen state.

There was a knock on his door. Nuts. That would be Quinn. Without waiting for a “come in,” intrusive, obnoxious, long-suffering Quinn pushed the door open and entered. His eyes swept around the filthy room, and then stared down sorrowfully, accusatorily, at Avery. “Still. You’re still in bed.”

Avery stared back up at him. “Looks like it.”

“Are you thinking of getting up at all today?”

Avery yawned, and the yawned resolved itself into a verbal response. “Not really, no.”

Quinn’s mouth opened and closed. It was comical. Finally, he said: “You know, Avery, it’s the weekend. When I go into work, I don’t have to deal with this crap.”

“You don’t have to deal with it now.”

“When I’m out in the world, I can forget about what you’re doing to your life. But when I’m home ...”

“Why don’t you take a walk?” Avery suggested. He knew he was an awful roommate these days. Creator of a nightmare living situation. But, hey. Quinn couldn’t find living with Avery more irritating than it was for Avery to live with righteously constructive, healthy, motivated Quinn.

Quinn pressed his lips together in a disapproving line. “I might have people over later,” he said abruptly.

“Who?”

“Ash might drop by.”

“Fine.”

 “But it’s awkward having guests,” Quinn said, his voice rising slightly in decibel level and shrillness, “when you’re lying around, semi-dressed, your room turning into a pigsty –”

“So, close my door.”

Quinn closed his eyes for a moment. Like a patient “normal” person counting to ten, to avoid losing his temper. He opened them. “You know Ash is going to want to say hello to you.”

Avery shifted very slightly, and gave thanks for how the pillow was now molded to the shape of his head, cupping it as he looked up. Even if the pillowcase could do with a wash. “You can both shout hello through my closed door. Or not. I might be sleeping.” Avery half-closed his eyes, as a way of intimating that sleep could be imminent: coming along to claim him at any time.

Quinn refused to take the hint and leave. “How many hours a day are you sleeping now?”

Avery rummaged around in his mind, bored by the question. “Um. I don’t really time myself. Twelve, maybe?”

“Twelve?”

“Or fourteen?”

“Are you on drugs?”

That was funny. Avery had actually thought about drugs. Opioids, legal and illegal. Maybe pot. Maybe he could experiment with cheap red wine? But … “Naah. Sleep comes naturally. In fact, I’m thinking of taking up hibernation.”

“You know it’s a sin, Avery,” Quinn said unexpectedly.

Huh? Sleep was a sin? Or hibernation? This was a startling enough development that Avery opened his eyes all the way and looked directly at his roommate. “What’s a sin?”

“Sloth,” Quinn explained, with barely checked impatience. “It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins.”

Avery gave a snort. Of derision. They both had had some weird Catholic school experiences in their misty past. It had been an initial source of bonding between them, in college. But Quinn might be living back there with all that stuff; Avery was not.

Quinn kept going with his altar boy routine, utterly serious: “It’s a Deadly Sin because it can kill you. And it’s a sin because you hurt other people and you hurt yourself, living this way. Steeped in sloth. Drowning in self-pity.” More and more contempt and judgement crept into his voice. “Lazy, apathetic, and torpid, like a couch potato that’s starting to rot.”

Oh, impressive. Torpid. Was Quinn using a “word-a-day” calendar? Would he go on to describe Avery as lethargic and malodorous?

“Whatever,” Avery told him agreeably. He moved his gaze up to the ceiling. All the little nubs and valleys in the stucco, under the off-white paint. Like an Impressionist painting that had bled out color and calcified. He’d gotten to know that ceiling view very well.

Quinn changed tactics, suddenly sounding kind and concerned. “Now, I understand that breaking up with Lainey was hard on you. I thought – the way she treated you absolutely sucked.”

God, Avery hated this roommate person. This old friend impostor. With every fiber of his torpid being. “I don’t want to talk to you about this, Quinn. I’ve been really clear about –”

“So, I understand a person going through a breakup like that ... just wanting to check out for a while. And then, with that asinine stuff at work –”

“Stop it.” He felt like breaking Quinn’s head. Quinn was damned lucky that Avery was flabby, cowardly, completely out of shape and unwilling to expend the energy required to kill Quinn. “Again. I have asked you repeatedly not to –”

“They were jerks to you! No question. It was unfair. You’d been there long enough that they should’ve seen your side of it, and kept you on. But ... this ...” Quinn glanced around helplessly again. “This is not any kind of a response. To spend months lying around in pajamas, or your underwear ...”

Did Avery actually have underpants on at the moment? Or was he going commando, under the sheet? He couldn’t remember. The sheet was not moving his pubic hairs and making them tickle, as it was doing with the hairs on his belly. He moved his torso slightly, and felt a bit of saggy elastic at his waist. Yup. The underpants were on.

Quinn droned on with the lecture. “Eating junk food, if you eat at all. With the shades down. Watching stupid clips on your phone, playing dumb games –”

“Quinn. You are not my father. You are not my shrink. You are not my kindergarten teacher or my coach or my priest or my personal trainer. You are my roommate. I do not need this kind of motivational lecture from –”

“Long before I was your roommate, Avery, I was your friend.” Quinn sounded all choked up with his own empathetic wonderfulness. His exquisite ability to care. “And I’m not any kind of friend to you if I don’t speak up. I’ve held off for weeks –”

“Leave.”

“Everyone is worried about you. You’re hurting your family, your friends and yourself most of all –”

“Leave. My. Room.”

Quinn stared at Avery for a few more beats. “Fine.” He was out the door – and Avery did not need to remind him to close it. He gave it a good, solid slam.

For a moment, Avery saw his room, and himself, as they must appear to Quinn. And to all normal, well-adjusted, sane, sanitary, motivated, right-thinking people. He smelled the room, the way that they might sniff at it, and wrinkled up his nose. “It’s true, actually,” he said out loud, yawning once more. “I’m a jerk.”

“No,” an odd, echoing voice said in reply. “You did the right thing.”

Avery looked around, more with his eyes than his neck. WTF?

“And your whole new approach to life – it’s right,” the resonant, dorky voice told him slowly.

“Who are you, and why would you say that?” Avery asked. If he had the energy, he’d have felt alarmed.

A creature crawled into view. Either it had crawled out of the wall near the window somehow, or else it crawled out of shadows onto a better lit part of the wall. It was hairy and unattractive. Not furry – the hair coming down from its head, and on its arms and going down its back, seemed long and matted – like old straw. The creature was chinless, with the parts of its rounded face coming together, when viewed in profile, as if headed toward a vanishing point an inch past its snout and the long line of a mouth underneath. The mouth was configured as a tepid pseudo-smile. The animal had a dark “mask” in the form of two smudgy stripes in its fur slashing down from white fur above its eyes – but it wasn’t cute, like a raccoon. It was fucking strange-looking. An unconvincing early draft of an actual biological creature. Its face looked like the face a child might fingerpaint onto a puppet. Except that its dark little nose was well-defined – like the black snout on a yappy little dog.

When it finally answered Avery’s question, so much time had elapsed, it felt odd to hear a response. “I’m Bradypus.”

It sounded like it rhymed with “platypus.” But this was not a platypus. This was a different, equally weird, unlikely creature. “Spell it,” Avery demanded.

“B.” The answer hung in the air. Apparently, the odd creature was too lazy to give more than an initial … But then: “R,” it added, again breaking the silence in an unexpected moment. Then, more waiting and watching. It was hard to see what was going on, over by the wall, but there seemed to be some sort of branch, and this creature hung down from it. “A,” it said. Avery had the patience to wait for two more letters, and then he cut in.

“You spell it like the Brady Bunch?”

“I guess.”

“Then, why don’t you pronounce it that way?” No answer was forthcoming, and Avery quickly tired of waiting for one. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s my genus.”

“An evil genus?” It was an attempt at a joke on Avery’s part. A pun. It didn’t really land. It came out kind of lame.

“Not so evil.”

“Okay, so what are you?”

“I’m a three-fingered sloth.”

Hmm. You ask a stupid question … “I thought it was ‘three-toed sloth.’”

“Either is fine. Either is reasonably descriptive.” The preposterous creature showed him its stupid-looking long finger-things that resembled long, awkward fingernails or toenails. It picked at its upside-down chin with them, in a clumsy, unappetizing way.

“So. Why are you in my room?”

“You conjured me up.” A blurting noise out in the street signified a car alarm going off. The sloth turned its head, which seemed to conclude its ridiculous body without the benefit of a neck, in the direction of the window. Turned its head … almost all the way around. A strange thing to watch.

“I conjured you?” Avery wondered whether he’d ever written a report on sloths for school when he was a kid. He didn’t think so. He’d barely heard of them. He’d had no idea what they looked like, or where they lived. Latin America? Africa? Australia? Not a clue.

“Yes,” came the delayed response. Followed by: “I’m your new imaginary friend.”

“I don’t want an imaginary friend. Go away.”

“Or what?”

Avery had been propped up on his elbows, studying the sloth, but now he sank his head back in the pillow. “Or nothing. I can’t be bothered to get up and threaten you, or chase you. That would require moving.”

“Hey, I feel you. Sounds awful.” It was said without a trace of sarcasm. Then, this Bradypus sloth monster reached for the trunk of whatever tree it was on – some tree made of light and shadows that emerged from the wall of Avery’s room. Everything about the way the sloth moved was wrong: the ridiculous shag which appeared so dirty, unwashed and even green in places, the sad, unconvincing puppet doghead with the long black mascara smudge streaks like slashes below the eyes, the ungainly, mis-proportioned limbs ending in the stupid, hooked, long three toe-fingers … but above all, it was the pace at which it did things. The slo-mo, bizarre, moving-like-air-was-Jell-O quality of how this creature inched up the trunk, and then along a skinny branch, hooking the toe-finger-claws around it.

So, why was Avery hallucinating this evolutionary mistake? Without the benefit of drugs? “Why did you say I’m doing the right thing?” he asked.

The deliberate, resonant voice, when it eventually filled the air, became even more expressive. “Slothfulness is a calling. A vocation. It’s a beautiful way of being. It’s not like greed, or wrath, or envy. It hurts no one. It doesn’t wish bad things on other people. It gets slandered and smeared by fools who cannot appreciate the beauty of it.”

Avery felt a twinge of skepticism. He was too disgusted by what he was becoming to embrace this new perspective. “Is that why sloths are slothful? Because it’s beautiful?”

The ridiculous animal ploddingly shook its bandit-masked, tiny head no. “Sloths are slothful because we eat leaves that are tough and poisonous – hard to digest. The leaves have to work their way through my multi-chambered stomach. It takes me weeks to digest a meal. And I only take a crap once a week.”

“Um. I don’t really need all that information.”

Bradypus bit into a big, green, rain-foresty leaf in a low-key way, chewed, swallowed, and kept on sloth-splaining: “If I burned calories faster, I’d die. But I don’t. I’m slothful. And appreciating the beauty of it – that’s just an extra perk. A fringe benefit. You get to see the world in slow motion. In stop motion. I’m using the word ‘see’ loosely here, since I don’t really see. Only a little bit, at night, when it’s dark.”

It took the sloth a long time to make it through a long speech like that. But Avery felt less impatient with the pauses and the drawn-out words. Maybe he was adjusting himself to the animal’s rhythms. Still, for whatever reason, he felt like playing devil’s advocate. Defending the position of irritating, sanctimonious Quinn: “My roommate is actually right. I’m kind of gross, these days. Sometimes I forget to shower. For days. I’m basically a pouty, self-indulgent slob. I’m reaching the point where I hardly leave the room, I hardly get out of bed, I lie around all day doing nothing ... I have my food delivered ... I don’t talk to people. I don’t read, or think all that hard. The idea of looking for a new job or a new relationship terrifies me. And bores me. And exhausts me.”

“Why should you look for those things?” Bradypus wanted to know.

Avery thought of shrugging beneath the sheet. But shrugging would require too much effort. “I need a job. My savings won’t last forever.”

“How long will they last?”

“I dunno. A few more months.”

“Then, why get up?”

Now, Avery took his time in answering. It wasn’t much of an answer. “Sometimes I just lie here and ... see how long I can go without moving ...”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“I imagine everyone else as worker ants. So busy. Scurrying around on an ant hill ...”

“That’s all they are,” Bradypus told him. “You have found a better way of being.”

Yeah. Better. Avery didn’t need drugs. He was high on sloth.

Then, Quinn harshed his mellow by barging into the room again, with barely a knock. He started in hectoring Avery, as though they were mid-conversation: “You realize, Avery – we’re thinking of staging an intervention. All the people who care about you. I mean, I guess that’s giving away the ‘surprise’ element ...”

“It’s not like throwing somebody a surprise party. It’s not a special treat.” Avery chuckled, and he could hear Bradypus over by the wall chuckling also.

“But I honestly don’t know what else we can do,” Quinn said.

“What do you think, Bradypus?” Avery asked.

“Huh?” Quinn said.

Avery considered the possibility that his roommate couldn’t see his new imaginary friend hanging by the skinny branch protruding from the wall. Well, whatever. Avery still needed the imaginary friend’s advice. “What can I say to make this kind, selfless, concerned roommate feel better about me, and go away?”

“Who are you talking to?” Quinn took a break from sounding righteous and threatening. He sounded perplexed, instead.

“I’m talking to my new friend.”

“Don’t expect the rest of them to see me,” Bradypus cautioned, and took another weird, dragged-out bite of a leaf.

“Yeah. I guess. It’s all good.” Avery sighed. He imagined that his mattress on the floor of his room was a waterbed. He’d sail away on it across the ocean, and to whatever country Bradypus was from. Whatever jungle or rain forest.

Through a forest of his own eyelashes, Avery was aware of Quinn peering down at him. Hovering over his face.

“Avery, are you sure you didn’t take something? Some kind of sleep medicine, that’s maybe more powerful than you thought?”

Avery tried to explain. “My friend is slothful, just like me. Sinful. Beautiful. Slothful. And that’s a mouthful.”

He giggled, and so did Bradypus.

“We’re on strike.” Avery continued. “In a world full of positive, pro-active, affirmational, perky people. Morning people. People who hit the ground running every day, and live life at a brisk pace. People who eat right and exercise!”

“Make fun of me all you want to,” Quinn snapped.

“But right now, all we want to do is sleep,” Bradypus prompted, far away, over by the wall near the window, with the shades pulled down.

“But right now,” Avery agreed, “all we want to do is sleep.” He shut his eyes. He was glad when he heard Quinn close the door on his way out.