Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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The Plight of the Orange Juice Container | Sep 29 2003

I couldn’t find my orange juice. I had made a so-called spritzer (orange juice and seltzer) to drink with dinner, and now it was past dinner and I was thirsty again, so I went to the refrigerator to get some more orange juice.

Finding an empty refrigerator shelf, I once again remembered the thing for which I will one day be famous. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before. I will be famous not for my writing but for my method of finding lost things. It is called the Barrish Rule, because it is expressed as a rule:

When something is lost, it is almost always in one of the three most likely places for it to be, but in a way you are not thinking.

Maybe that’s not a rule exactly, but whatever it is, it’s the truth. The trick is, you have to get yourself to go back and look in the places you already looked, but in a new way. This is hard to do. Once people have checked a particular place for a thing, they draw a big line through that place in their minds and scribble a note in the margin that says, “Don’t look there. It’s definitely not there; I already checked,” and then they draw a line from the note to the image of the place and put an big arrow at the end of the line which points to the place, and if they have time they fill in the arrow a little so that they can’t possibly not see it in the future. The arrow ends up looking something like this:

Anyway you should see how quiet people get when you make them go back to re-check the places they’ve already checked and you ask them to check these places in a new way and they look at you like you’re a dick for making them do this, and then, ho-ho, the thing is there. People get very quiet.

Now, as to my orange juice… it wasn’t on the refrigerator shelf, so I looked to see if I had left it on the counter, which I hadn’t, so I looked to see if I had brought it over to my computer, which is something I do do sometimes but in this case had not.

One, two, three places.

I opened the refrigerator again and stepped back. No orange juice. I stood a good ten feet from the counter and scanned it slowly. Nothing. I turned and looked at my desk again. Nada. Then I walked over to my bed and took in the entire apartment. It was, I saw with some sadness, an apartment bereft of orange juice.

Could I have finished the container and thrown it out? This would count possibility number four, and I was damn certain it hadn’t happened, and yet I still made myself check the trash can, which as expected was orange-juice-less.

Remembering my rule (the rule, remember, for which I will one day be famous), I forced myself to repeat the entire operation again, minus the trash can, but in a new way. I would characterize this new way as pissed. I looked in all the places I had already looked, but this time as a person who was pissed to have to be doing this. It didn’t help.

When I was kid and something was lost, my mother was fond of saying that the lost thing didn’t just get up walk and away. I imagined that the container of orange juice did in fact just get up and walk away. It had grown little arms and legs, forced open the refrigerator from inside, climbed down the shelves, and scrambled off into the bathroom, where it was now cowering in the bathtub, the poor thing, having realized that there is no way out of my apartment except through the front door, which I am not in the habit of leaving open (below is an artist’s rendering of the plight of the orange juice container).

My own plight, while comparatively less harrowing, was nonetheless beginning to annoy the shit out of me. There had been an orange juice container in the apartment. I had combined some of the orange juice from this container with seltzer and had drunk the combination, a so-called spritzer, with dinner. The glass from which I had drunk was still sitting on my desk. If I went over and looked inside it (which I was not about to do, FYI), I would find little pieces of orange juice pulp at the bottom.

A certain unease began to roll in. Could I possibly be remembering these things wrongly? Had my mind gone off its wheels for a bit and moved last week’s spritzer to tonight? It didn’t seem possible, and yet where the goddamn fuck was that orange juice container?

I walked over to the kitchen and opened all the cabinets. The orange juice container was sitting on same shelf as the plates and bowls and glasses. I had placed it in front of a row of glasses, I suppose because it is more closely related to glasses than plates or bowls.

I may not end up becoming so famous.