Product Guide

It will be heavy.  You will drop it, and it will fall on your toe.  The bruise will be yellow and blue and green.  You will lose your toenail, the wound will fester and weep, you will develop gangrene, and you will lose your leg.  At the rehab center where you learn to walk again, you will fall in love with the physical therapist, Jill. She will leave her husband, and you will leave your wife, your children will visit you on weekends, you’ll have cookouts and play touch football.  It will be loud, louder than comfortable listening volume.  Blood will flow from your ears and down the side of your face, down your neck, staining your white button-down shirt, so you’ll have to go to the dry cleaners, where the Vietnamese woman whose son Stephen is in your daughter’s third-grade class will shake her head and smile.  You will use the shirt as a rag, torn in strips for dusting the furniture or cleaning up the spots on the rug where the dog vomits and the cats pee.  It will be absorbing.  You won’t be able to stop, you will miss your favorite reality tv shows, you will stop going to the movies and reading People magazine and The New Yorker, you will stop leaving your house and you will lose your job.  The bank will re-possess your home, and the government will sue you for back taxes.  It will be bright.  You will see spots, they will arrange themselves in swirling geometries of nerve lattice, like the streaming fractals on the inside of your eyelids.  It will be dark, your vision grainy in the low light, where what you see is the electrical noise of your own retina, the background static of your brain.  It will be long.  If you stretch it out to its full length, it will be longer than your intestines, it will wrap twice around the circumference of the earth.  If you chop it up and stack it on itself, it will take you longer than the age of the universe to pile it up to the moon.  It will be small.  You will look at it, your vision will blur with quantum indeterminacy, cats will die in boxes in thought experiments, and you won’t be able to decide if it’s a wave or a billiard ball.  Scientists will theorize that it is flashing in and out of existence in empty space.  It will cost only fifty dollars after a mail-in rebate, you will pay extra for the extended warranty, and you will drive home with it in your trunk.  You will carry it into your backyard, where you will bury it in a shoebox.  Afterwards, you will mow the lawn, take a shower, and drink a beer.  At first, you will feel different.  You may experience abdominal cramps, nausea, or lower back pain.  A small portion of the population will develop a skin rash.  But soon, very soon, you will feel as if everything is exactly the way it has always been.