A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room

A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room is a 1986 short story by George Saunders, his first published story. You can read it online here. It begins,

It’s like this, and it is no dream: First off, a plastic palomino and its stiff-armed rider float above a toybox. The rider is a dyed Custer, and everything’s red. I mean boots and kerchief and holster and eyebrows even. He is one ruined and reduced cavalryman, he was poured and solidified with horribly bowed legs, simply because his only reason for existence is to straddle the palomino. Denied Comanches. But the horse and rider float and revolve anyway, on the lookout for marauders. They rotate at about a revolution a minute, as per specs. Also: a velour basketball, half the size of a real basketball, hangs mid-aired over a crib. In the closet, the arms of tiny jackets and sweaters wave and salute wildly. The threads of the carpet flatten out like grass under a helicopter, and then circular waves run outward from the middle of the room. When the waves die down, it’s just a regular carpet again. The whole cycle takes three and a half minutes. An empty rocking chair rocks faster than any mortal granny could.

Out the wide window across the room, it’s a crescent moon in bough-crook kind of thing; caramel lights through sectioned panes in houses of white wood, trees blown and slanting like smoke. Windows and doors of the houses wide open with Trust. Children breathe pillow air. Hills roll away behind the row of houses in a fairly pastoral manner. It is a kind of smooth blue Ireland. And the blue is in the room too. It is the blue of night scenes in animation. The cloak of night and all that. It is very much like the nights when little kids point at the moon and say odd things.

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It is a memorable story. Tobias Wolff says,

So what did I see in this story? I saw the future, nothing less—the writer destined to be the consummate poet of American corporate-speak (“They rotate at about a revolution per minute, as per specs”), a great chronicler of human desire struggling to define itself against a world of manufactured, themed, reality—life subsumed by franchises and doled out in market-friendly dollops drenched in novocaine language: “This is an Employee Objective Assessment Evening.” And the story was really, really funny. What did it all mean? Search me. The thrill was in the ride, not in the arriving. Later he’d work out the destination piece, plenty of time for that. And so he did, again and again. He has become a writer of masterpieces.

So what a joy it is to read this again, and feel the renegade heart beating against the ribs of the story, and know that I am a prophet.

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And we had a bit of snow last night! Snow! That's quite unusual here in Memphis.

The streets are clear, though there was a bit of ice at some places earlier.