The Label Maker

"Today, all day I had the feeling

the world was just an address

no better than alright.

But here you are 

and what was just a world is a star..."

West Side Story

Content Warning:

Dark humour some may find troubling

Transcript

The Label Maker

On the second of May, one very warm year, Siobhan bought a label maker from a department store. She sped home because her youngest son was home alone and he didn’t like to be in the house by himself for very long. He was only nineteen. Anyway, Siobhan had no desire to stay out and was glad to return swiftly, with her label maker. She couldn’t remember the last time a purchase had so elated her. At the house, even before she made her umpteenth cup of tea, she unboxed the label maker and tested it. The function of each button was obvious and it worked like a charm. She typed her name in digital, block capitals on the tiny screen and then pressed print. A little curl of white paper slid from an opening in the side of the label maker. It said SIOBHAN and had a peelable back so it could be stuck to any surface. Siobhan liberated it from the machine that had produced it by pressing down the little blade-button which scissored the label cleanly off the role of paper within the label maker. Having looked at it, proudly, Siobhan put the newborn label on her forehead. It stuck. Siobhan chuckled.

            The first thing she did was show her son, Leonard, the label maker.

            “Look, Lenny. A label maker,” she said, excitedly, entering his half of the living room. He was intent on the screen of his mobile phone and didn’t look up. He didn’t see the label on her forehead.

            Leonard didn’t react to the label maker at first. He took nothing on trust, nothing could be explained or illuminated for him with words. He had to test, try, experience a thing’s worth firsthand before he believed in it. He shot the label maker a cursory glance.

            “Looks like a calculator,” he said. It did look like a calculator.

            “It’s not a calculator, Lenny. Look. Lenny, look. Lenny! Look!” 

            At last Lenny looked up where indicated. He saw on his mother’s forehead the freshly made label bearing his mother’s name. 

            Siobhan was expecting Lenny to shrug, declare his disinterest proudly, impudently. But he didn’t do that. He tossed his phone to one side, and received the label maker gratefully in curious hands.

            He encountered no difficulty in working it and sired his first label promptly. He shaded the screen while he typed so his mother couldn’t see what he was typing. She found out when she looked at the label. It said: FUCK OFF. Leonard put it on his forehead and forced a comedically glum expression. Both he and his mother laughed.

Bitten by the label-making bug, the effect was instant, instantly intoxicating. Leonard’s enthusiasm knew no bounds. He wanted nothing but to play with the label maker, all the time. His devotion to the activity was such that “play” was a hopelessly inadequate way of describing it. It was an occupation in the truest sense. It was an obsession. Siobhan tried to think of a reason not to allow her son more or less permanent custody of the label maker but she couldn’t come up with one. She couldn’t even think of anything she herself wanted to label. Why she had purchased the label maker in the first place was a mystery to her. If there was an answer it was lost, forgotten. She spend a great deal of her time trying to remember it. But couldn’t.     

            That bedtime, Siobhan produced a mug of hot chocolate for her son. Lenny smiled, then typed and printed a label into existence. HOT CHOCOLATE. He stuck it to the mug of hot chocolate. 

            “But what about when the hot chocolate’s all gone?” Siobhan enquired.

            Lenny made a face. Then he made a new label. He stuck it on top of the HOT CHOCOLATE label. MUG FOR BEVERAGES, the new label said.

Lenny’s obsession mounted and consumed him, like a great wave. Within three days he had made his compulsive and incessant label-making a full-time profession. Everything was to be labelled, if it wasn’t already. Every object in the house, every item of clothing in the drawers, every article or utensil in the cupboards, every piece of furniture, every tool in the shed, every plant in the garden. Every toy in the toy box. 

But that wasn’t all. By the close of that week, Lenny was no longer satisfied with just the one label on every individual entity. He soon wanted the entire surface of every single item to be comprehensively covered in labels bearing its name. It was as though he were converting everything he encountered in his daily existence into a new form, a new ironized version of itself. It was as though he was putting quotation marks around everything. For example, the LG speaker was no longer a speaker because it was covered in newly printed sticky labels bearing the noun SPEAKER. Its buttons could no longer be pressed because of its thick and complete mummification in paper labels, it couldn’t be connected to any sound source because labels were in the way of the sockets, and even if one did somehow manage to switch it on and connect it up, the sound would be muffled, trapped behind an imprisoning wallpaper of labels. 

Siobhan worked at her writing, most days. She spent hours in perfect solitude at the desk of her attic room. When Lenny wasn’t labelling, he “watched TV”. He wished he could stop time, trap moments in glass jars, label them. WATCHING TV. Print. Not possible, not possible, he sighed. He just stared at the screen, which was completely papered over in a busy blizzard of white and the word TELEVISION. 

            Siobhan came downstairs each day to a house more comprehensively labelled than she could have ever imagined. Each and every thing in their house was now replaced by an iterative coating of the name by which it was known.

            Prowling about with the label maker lodged in his fist, like a little gun or taser, Lenny started on the food. It was hard to verify that the vegetable underneath the wallpaper of the word CUCUMBER wasn’t a courgette, or the round, knobbly lump coated in the word CAULIFLOWER wasn’t a cabbage. But that didn’t matter much anymore. Siobhan was glad her son was occupied. Even though she had to eat surreptitiously, steal food stuffs, liberate them from their wrapping, eat them, all in secret. Night fell and fell again.    

            A few days later, slightly less than two weeks since Lenny and the label maker were first introduced, Siobhan woke up to find herself encased in a tight suit of white paper. Lenny had labelled every part of her. He had started to mummify her in many hundreds of printings of the word SIOBHAN but had ended up taking a more anonymous approach. Every part of her exterior anatomy was shrouded, wrapped in a casing of the name science had given it. Her arms lay in white sleeves woven of the word ARM, her legs in white sticky trousers made of the label LEG, her forehead said FOREHEAD, her cheeks said CHEEKS, her breasts each bore the word BREAST, her mouth, eyes, nose, ears, neck, chest, stomach, nape, back, backside, vagina, limbs, ankles, feet, and toes were each coated, about their entire surface area, in labels that said what they were. She lay still and didn’t struggle as the pinch of her wordy, bodily vest asphyxiated her and she died. 

            After that Lenny went outside, still holding the label maker. He knocked on the neighbour’s door and waited for them to answer it. While he waited, he made labels, and began to cover the door in many copies of the word DOOR. Then he went inside. 

            A week later, a young man, little more than a boy, was seen walking the long road into town. You could tell by his eerie, slow-moving silhouette that he had something in his hands, a little machine, exhausted and husky with use but with life in it yet. You could tell also that he was coming closer, that whatever his mission was he took it very seriously, that he meant business. The label maker emitted a constant ailed whirr, his fingers moved with tremendous, speedy fluency, typing the world’s miscellany of common nouns, the same chapped, bloody digits able to peel off the back-film in a second. He regularly stopped, stooped, and labelled things. In his wake, he left a matted frost of labels, black against white, each banally telling what lay obscured beneath it. A great creeping winter of white and black went with him to the town, making for it with an intent and murderous hunger.