SQUISHED.(The Talk of the Town)(Patrice Lumumba Moore)

In retrospect, it almost has the ring of a creative-problem-solving challenge: can you fit more than fifty industrial-size trash bags' worth of junk in a ten-by-ten room? As we now know, thanks to Patrice Lumumba Moore, the answer is yes--but barely. Moore, who is forty-three, returned from the corner store on the Saturday after Christmas and squeezed, as usual, past the nearly barricaded door to his tiny but stuffed-to-the-ceiling Bronx apartment, which implausibly housed perhaps the city's largest and most varied private collection of magazines: Advertising Age, Ebony, Harvard Business Review, Penthouse. Moments later, he heard an ominous noise overhead. It was the beginning of a domestic avalanche.

"Books were falling everywhere, and I tried to catch some--that's where I cut my knees," Moore recalled last week, from a bed in the intensive-care unit at St. Barnabas Hospital. "I had crates up top. Had my books in crates--you know, them metal crates. I'm lucky I was standing up. If I was down, I'd have been crushed. So I'm a lucky guy." Moore was trapped by his own abundant belongings for two days, before a team of neighbors and firemen, with the help of a crowbar, rescued him, and discovered that he was not merely an eccentric pack rat; he had apparently never thrown anything out.

"Compulsive hoarding" was how the Times described Moore's behavior. "Disposophobia" is Ron Alford's preferred term. "It's an affliction, it's really a disease," Alford said last week. "It starts in the head of the people and manifests somewhere on the floor and on horizontal surfaces in their dwelling units." Alford, who is sixty-three, runs Disaster Masters, Inc., a Queens-based "crisis management" service specializing in, among other things, abnormal clutter. He is the author of such articles as "How to Manage Your Disaster Recovery Misery Index" and "Counter-Terrorism for Consumers Against Big Business with Strategic Media," and he is now at work on a book called "Disposophobia: The Fear of Getting Rid of Stuff."

Alford had recently returned from an emergency decluttering mission in San Francisco. "A guy's wife left him," he explained. "She moved out of the house because the bed couldn't be used, you know, for its intended purpose." Now, thanks to Ron, the couple was back together. As for Moore's case, Alford was unimpressed.

"Oh, it's chump change," he said. "I'm not being derogatory about it. It's just that this is what I do for a ...