Climate Change
Note: There is some language in this story not suitable for younger readers.
They
sat across from one another at the breakfast table. The distance
between them was three feet, forty inches at the most. It felt much
longer, so he reached out for her with the hand not holding his fork.
This was easier said than done. Between them, at the center of the table, was a lamp made from a spent wine bottle, a do-it-yourself memorial to a happy evening years before. Flanking the lamp were oversized salt and pepper shakers fashioned in the cartoony, bulbous shapes of Santa and Mrs. Claus. The shakers had been a gag gift from a friend.
To get his hand across the table required him to lean in and reach around the clutter. This he did. She did not respond. His hand lay dead and unclaimed on the oak tabletop, and the table’s side pressed uncomfortably into his gut. Failure.
He retrieved his hand and set it to the task of dousing his scrambled eggs and venison sausage with hot sauce. He noticed himself hot-saucing far more than usual, a persistent and mechanical shakeshakeshakeshake.
The man covered his food in Cholula because he craved a jangly, raw feeling in his mouth to match the tingling, pleasant pain coursing through the rest of his exhausted body. He was lost in pain until he heard a muttered “What the…” float his way from across the table. He put the hot sauce bottle down.
His wife spoke to him. “You’re supposed to return from your business trip on the 27th. Occasionally, because of weather, you don’t return until the 28th. But it’s the 31st! The 31st?
“And to top all this, you send me no word the whole time! Not once over the last week did you contact me! And, when you finally come home, you come back tan. Tan! You never tan. Honey, what’s going on?”
Each of the words in his wife’s last sentence were drawn out and made both multi-syllabic and dramatic. After a brief pause in which he only chewed, nodded, and looked at his plate, his wife continued to speak, to elaborate upon her theme.
He felt her words enter him, expand, and spread through his brain. This served as an interesting counterpoint to the hot sauce fire spreading across his tongue. He shifted his eyes from his plate to a window behind his wife’s head. Then he spoke.
“Annalina, I used to tan. Quite a lot, actually. Long ago, before you and I met, I had a house overlooking the Aegean Sea. To call it a ‘house’ is a bit grand. It was just a single room – a fisherman’s shack or maybe a holy man’s cell.
“I used to leave the city and visit my room on the sand. I’d go alone, always alone. I’d keep no schedule and walk out the front door whenever I pleased so I could feel the press of the sun on my bare shoulders. I’d pray and celebrate Mass alone, just me and the gulls who’d catch the holy bread I’d toss their way. One time, Anna, I rode a dolphin through the waves. Imagine that! Can you imagine that? A dolphin!”
She stared at him, but he didn’t see her. He was looking out the window as he spoke.
“And sometimes, when I was quite sure no one was around, I’d strip naked and chase crabs along the beach. As I ran I’d laugh long and strong from deep down in my belly, and that laughter would become a prayer. The laugh was holy. It was me. I guess that’s why it eventually became so connected with my marketing.”
His vision drifted through the window and took in his estate. The flat, cold landscape had a primal, beautiful simplicity, the arresting essence of a superficially simple but unsolvable riddle. His land could captivate a certain type of person, coax him in, and drive him mad. That was why so many explorers over the years had been drawn up here to wander and to die. But he was not that type of person, not at his core.
He looked at the crystalline blue and white glory that stretched beyond his outbuildings and stables and, when his land finally surpassed the reach of his keen eyes, he filled in its contours with memories made from the years he’d walked its homogenous grandeur. Then, at last, the eye of his imagination reached the sudden, stark edge of his estate, the place where his territory melted and dropped violently into the sea.
With a speed that accelerated with each passing year this boundary line between glacier and ocean drew closer to his breakfast table. He knew this to be true. At first this knowledge had filled him with a mix of rage and powerlessness that felt toxic to him. Such an emotional stew did not fit well with his disposition, occupation, or creed.
But on this particular New Year’s Eve morning his heart approached the summit of this sad reality by a new trail. The future looked bad – the disappearance of his land clearly was very bad – but at least it was new. Perhaps this global problem was a small price to pay for something new for him.
Even as he thought this, he knew it was petty and selfish, like so many of the letters he’d received from children through the years. He allowed himself a small smile at the connection.
His wife came at him again. “Shacks by the sea? What are you getting at? Honey, I’m not talking about ancient history. I’m talking about this week. Why were you so late returning from your business trip this week?”
He looked his wife full in the face. “I don’t know, Sweetie. Perhaps what you call ‘ancient history’ and the future are more connected than we think. Perhaps we’ll soon need to relocate. Perhaps we’ll soon need to rebrand ourselves and our enterprise. Perhaps soon the ice will be gone and we’ll have to claim a piece of warm sand beside the sea, and then my ancient history will have become our future.
“And, Annalina, perhaps that will be the good thing that comes from the destruction of our land. Perhaps that will be the diamond buried in the turd The Askers are forcing upon us by what they continue to do.”
His wife interrupted him. “Don’t talk like that. Not at the table.”
“Oh, Anna! Perhaps their terrible gift will unlock something long trapped within us. Maybe the shrinking ice beneath our feet will expand the hearts within our chests. That’s all I’m saying. How did that Monty Python character put it when he was singing from a cross? Always look on the bright side of life. That was it, I think.”
His wife still looked confused. He couldn’t blame her. His mind felt feverish, and even he was not entirely sure what he was getting at, but he decided to press on anyway.
“Anna, do you know why I do what I do? I mean, behind all the image casting and the costumes?”
“You do it because you are generous and God is generous, and your giving reflects the giving of the Lord.”
“That’s true, but it’s not the deepest truth.”
“Not the deepest truth?”
“I do it – or at least I first did it – because growing up in this world is just so damn painful. Hear me out, Sweetie. So very long ago, a peasant boy came and told me about three sisters who lived on the outskirts of our town. The sisters were still so young – just children – but they were old enough to be forced to marry and too poor to do it with dignity.
“Anna, I cried at the news, but not because the sisters were poor, not at first. I wept because they were children, and yet expected to be so old so fast. Then I cried because their father didn’t have the money to make their aging easier. I cried to God. I wailed to Him. ‘Why does it hurt so much to grow up in this world?’ I yelled at Him.
“And His answer was for me to do what I did. I, Annalina, I was his answer. I went out in the night and pitched bags of gold through their windows. Through me God made their growing up in dignity possible. Anna, it hurts so much to grow up in this world. That’s why I do what I do.”
He fell silent, and his wife filled the void. “OK, Nick, I hear you. But why do you talk this strange way after being gone so long, so unexpectedly?”
“Because when I met Celia the other night, it all came together. She understood. She understood not just the pressure that comes from the endless demands of The Askers or the weight of running a multi-national organization. Annalina, she understood in the pit of her soul the reason all that super-structure is there in the first place.”
His wife flattened the front of her apron, patted the bun of hair atop her head, and adjusted her glasses. She did it all with one swift, nervous move of both hands working in concert. “What are you talking about, Nick? Celia? Who? Honey, you are clearly exhausted. Do you need to lie down?”
“No, no. Think about it a moment, Anna. Think about how brutal and odd it is that people must grow up this way. You are a five-year-old child, and one of the first notable things that happens to you is that one of your teeth falls out of your head. What?!? And there’s blood. And there’s this hole in your face when you smile. And then this other, bigger tooth comes in, and it comes in all twisted and snaggly.”
“All right, Nick. I’m following you, I think,” said his wife.
“It’s horrible isn’t it? It’s like some weird transformation. It’s like you’re some hideous changeling, that Kafka character turning into a cockroach.
“But, Anna, at least you can know when this awful aging mess happens you can take that disgusting, broken, rejected part of yourself – that discarded tooth, that hunk of exposed bone you once had in your head but now hold in your hand – and you can put it under your pillow. And when you do a sweet, magical, beautiful woman will come while you sleep and exchange it for money.
Anna this – even just this this – makes the horror of growing up in this harsh world a little less horrible. Do you feel the power and glory of that? Even a little?”
His wife squenched up her nose and closed her eyes into slits. “That magical, beautiful woman is Celia?” she asked.
“That’s Celia,” he replied.
“Oh, I see,” she said with shadows in her voice.
He took a deep breath, and a small chuckle slipped out of him. Even that was enough to rattle his coffee cup a little. “It’s really quite funny now that I think about it.”
“What?” his wife asked.
“It’s funny Celia and I had never crossed paths before. I know that there are lots and lots of houses, and it is pretty unlikely that we’d be in the same house at the same time, but we’ve been at our careers for so long, you’d figure we’d have crossed paths before. But nope.”
“Yes, you’d figure.” Annalina yanked her gold, wire-rimmed glasses off her face and started grinding their lenses with the edge of her apron.
He was staring out the window again. “But then suddenly there we were. We met in a living room in Des Moines. We shared a few cookies and a little milk. We talked, and I remembered who I was, and I wanted to visit the sea again. Not the sea that chews my land here, but the sea that kisses the beach I remember from back when giving gifts was itself a gift.” He trailed off.
“Alone?” she said. “Alone. You wanted to see the sea and the beach alone, right?”
He said nothing.
“Nicholas, are you leaving me – leaving us – for the fucking Tooth Fairy?”
The shock of her words wrestled his eyes from the window and returned them to his wife. He noticed in a flash that the shock wasn’t primarily from the enormity of what she had just asked him, but from the fact that she had actually cursed. He could not remember her ever having done that before, even when she’d burned her hands on the tiny, awkward pies she used to make as treats for the elves to eat while they celebrated their Sunday Sabbath.
“Anna, it’s not like that.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” she said as she rose from the table and went to the kitchen.
He forked his last bits of egg and swirled them around his plate in an attempt to get at every last atom of hot sauce. As he chewed his last bite, he again looked out the window at the massive whiteness that surrounded him. He chewed, and then he felt a sudden revulsion toward his bulging gut and his tired tag line, his clichéd Ho!Ho!Ho!
He looked out beyond the garages that housed his two dozen sleighs. He looked out beyond the bunk houses that billeted the elves who shoveled reindeer shit and catalogued his toy orders in vast data bases.
As he gazed a song lyric wrote itself across the inside of his skull. He had heard the lyric sung by Johnny Cash, but he thought someone else had written the song. But the way Cash sung it was the way he felt it, and so he was glad he didn’t know the original.
He mumbled the words under his breath: “What have I become / My sweetest friend / Everyone I know goes away / In the end / And you could have it all / My empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt.”
“What did you say, Nicolas?” Anna had returned from the kitchen and was clearing the dishes. She looked unsteady on her feet, another rarity to go with her cursing.
“Nothing, Sweetie.” He said nothing more after that. He wanted to, but he couldn’t – not yet. There would be more than enough time for talk. That was cold comfort for her, he knew this, but it was all he had to give.
In the silence he continued to stare out into the bleak distance, and he noted that saying the lyrics, even if just to himself, had made him feel lighter, at least a little.
And now he thought he heard a noise roll into his breakfast room from far away. It sounded like the great cracking crash of glacial ice collapsing into the hungry mouth of a warming sea. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was the crash of the surf against a Turkish shore.
Either possibility meant uncertainty, but this was not the same as being afraid. He was not afraid.
This was easier said than done. Between them, at the center of the table, was a lamp made from a spent wine bottle, a do-it-yourself memorial to a happy evening years before. Flanking the lamp were oversized salt and pepper shakers fashioned in the cartoony, bulbous shapes of Santa and Mrs. Claus. The shakers had been a gag gift from a friend.
To get his hand across the table required him to lean in and reach around the clutter. This he did. She did not respond. His hand lay dead and unclaimed on the oak tabletop, and the table’s side pressed uncomfortably into his gut. Failure.
He retrieved his hand and set it to the task of dousing his scrambled eggs and venison sausage with hot sauce. He noticed himself hot-saucing far more than usual, a persistent and mechanical shakeshakeshakeshake.
The man covered his food in Cholula because he craved a jangly, raw feeling in his mouth to match the tingling, pleasant pain coursing through the rest of his exhausted body. He was lost in pain until he heard a muttered “What the…” float his way from across the table. He put the hot sauce bottle down.
His wife spoke to him. “You’re supposed to return from your business trip on the 27th. Occasionally, because of weather, you don’t return until the 28th. But it’s the 31st! The 31st?
“And to top all this, you send me no word the whole time! Not once over the last week did you contact me! And, when you finally come home, you come back tan. Tan! You never tan. Honey, what’s going on?”
Each of the words in his wife’s last sentence were drawn out and made both multi-syllabic and dramatic. After a brief pause in which he only chewed, nodded, and looked at his plate, his wife continued to speak, to elaborate upon her theme.
He felt her words enter him, expand, and spread through his brain. This served as an interesting counterpoint to the hot sauce fire spreading across his tongue. He shifted his eyes from his plate to a window behind his wife’s head. Then he spoke.
“Annalina, I used to tan. Quite a lot, actually. Long ago, before you and I met, I had a house overlooking the Aegean Sea. To call it a ‘house’ is a bit grand. It was just a single room – a fisherman’s shack or maybe a holy man’s cell.
“I used to leave the city and visit my room on the sand. I’d go alone, always alone. I’d keep no schedule and walk out the front door whenever I pleased so I could feel the press of the sun on my bare shoulders. I’d pray and celebrate Mass alone, just me and the gulls who’d catch the holy bread I’d toss their way. One time, Anna, I rode a dolphin through the waves. Imagine that! Can you imagine that? A dolphin!”
She stared at him, but he didn’t see her. He was looking out the window as he spoke.
“And sometimes, when I was quite sure no one was around, I’d strip naked and chase crabs along the beach. As I ran I’d laugh long and strong from deep down in my belly, and that laughter would become a prayer. The laugh was holy. It was me. I guess that’s why it eventually became so connected with my marketing.”
His vision drifted through the window and took in his estate. The flat, cold landscape had a primal, beautiful simplicity, the arresting essence of a superficially simple but unsolvable riddle. His land could captivate a certain type of person, coax him in, and drive him mad. That was why so many explorers over the years had been drawn up here to wander and to die. But he was not that type of person, not at his core.
He looked at the crystalline blue and white glory that stretched beyond his outbuildings and stables and, when his land finally surpassed the reach of his keen eyes, he filled in its contours with memories made from the years he’d walked its homogenous grandeur. Then, at last, the eye of his imagination reached the sudden, stark edge of his estate, the place where his territory melted and dropped violently into the sea.
With a speed that accelerated with each passing year this boundary line between glacier and ocean drew closer to his breakfast table. He knew this to be true. At first this knowledge had filled him with a mix of rage and powerlessness that felt toxic to him. Such an emotional stew did not fit well with his disposition, occupation, or creed.
But on this particular New Year’s Eve morning his heart approached the summit of this sad reality by a new trail. The future looked bad – the disappearance of his land clearly was very bad – but at least it was new. Perhaps this global problem was a small price to pay for something new for him.
Even as he thought this, he knew it was petty and selfish, like so many of the letters he’d received from children through the years. He allowed himself a small smile at the connection.
His wife came at him again. “Shacks by the sea? What are you getting at? Honey, I’m not talking about ancient history. I’m talking about this week. Why were you so late returning from your business trip this week?”
He looked his wife full in the face. “I don’t know, Sweetie. Perhaps what you call ‘ancient history’ and the future are more connected than we think. Perhaps we’ll soon need to relocate. Perhaps we’ll soon need to rebrand ourselves and our enterprise. Perhaps soon the ice will be gone and we’ll have to claim a piece of warm sand beside the sea, and then my ancient history will have become our future.
“And, Annalina, perhaps that will be the good thing that comes from the destruction of our land. Perhaps that will be the diamond buried in the turd The Askers are forcing upon us by what they continue to do.”
His wife interrupted him. “Don’t talk like that. Not at the table.”
“Oh, Anna! Perhaps their terrible gift will unlock something long trapped within us. Maybe the shrinking ice beneath our feet will expand the hearts within our chests. That’s all I’m saying. How did that Monty Python character put it when he was singing from a cross? Always look on the bright side of life. That was it, I think.”
His wife still looked confused. He couldn’t blame her. His mind felt feverish, and even he was not entirely sure what he was getting at, but he decided to press on anyway.
“Anna, do you know why I do what I do? I mean, behind all the image casting and the costumes?”
“You do it because you are generous and God is generous, and your giving reflects the giving of the Lord.”
“That’s true, but it’s not the deepest truth.”
“Not the deepest truth?”
“I do it – or at least I first did it – because growing up in this world is just so damn painful. Hear me out, Sweetie. So very long ago, a peasant boy came and told me about three sisters who lived on the outskirts of our town. The sisters were still so young – just children – but they were old enough to be forced to marry and too poor to do it with dignity.
“Anna, I cried at the news, but not because the sisters were poor, not at first. I wept because they were children, and yet expected to be so old so fast. Then I cried because their father didn’t have the money to make their aging easier. I cried to God. I wailed to Him. ‘Why does it hurt so much to grow up in this world?’ I yelled at Him.
“And His answer was for me to do what I did. I, Annalina, I was his answer. I went out in the night and pitched bags of gold through their windows. Through me God made their growing up in dignity possible. Anna, it hurts so much to grow up in this world. That’s why I do what I do.”
He fell silent, and his wife filled the void. “OK, Nick, I hear you. But why do you talk this strange way after being gone so long, so unexpectedly?”
“Because when I met Celia the other night, it all came together. She understood. She understood not just the pressure that comes from the endless demands of The Askers or the weight of running a multi-national organization. Annalina, she understood in the pit of her soul the reason all that super-structure is there in the first place.”
His wife flattened the front of her apron, patted the bun of hair atop her head, and adjusted her glasses. She did it all with one swift, nervous move of both hands working in concert. “What are you talking about, Nick? Celia? Who? Honey, you are clearly exhausted. Do you need to lie down?”
“No, no. Think about it a moment, Anna. Think about how brutal and odd it is that people must grow up this way. You are a five-year-old child, and one of the first notable things that happens to you is that one of your teeth falls out of your head. What?!? And there’s blood. And there’s this hole in your face when you smile. And then this other, bigger tooth comes in, and it comes in all twisted and snaggly.”
“All right, Nick. I’m following you, I think,” said his wife.
“It’s horrible isn’t it? It’s like some weird transformation. It’s like you’re some hideous changeling, that Kafka character turning into a cockroach.
“But, Anna, at least you can know when this awful aging mess happens you can take that disgusting, broken, rejected part of yourself – that discarded tooth, that hunk of exposed bone you once had in your head but now hold in your hand – and you can put it under your pillow. And when you do a sweet, magical, beautiful woman will come while you sleep and exchange it for money.
Anna this – even just this this – makes the horror of growing up in this harsh world a little less horrible. Do you feel the power and glory of that? Even a little?”
His wife squenched up her nose and closed her eyes into slits. “That magical, beautiful woman is Celia?” she asked.
“That’s Celia,” he replied.
“Oh, I see,” she said with shadows in her voice.
He took a deep breath, and a small chuckle slipped out of him. Even that was enough to rattle his coffee cup a little. “It’s really quite funny now that I think about it.”
“What?” his wife asked.
“It’s funny Celia and I had never crossed paths before. I know that there are lots and lots of houses, and it is pretty unlikely that we’d be in the same house at the same time, but we’ve been at our careers for so long, you’d figure we’d have crossed paths before. But nope.”
“Yes, you’d figure.” Annalina yanked her gold, wire-rimmed glasses off her face and started grinding their lenses with the edge of her apron.
He was staring out the window again. “But then suddenly there we were. We met in a living room in Des Moines. We shared a few cookies and a little milk. We talked, and I remembered who I was, and I wanted to visit the sea again. Not the sea that chews my land here, but the sea that kisses the beach I remember from back when giving gifts was itself a gift.” He trailed off.
“Alone?” she said. “Alone. You wanted to see the sea and the beach alone, right?”
He said nothing.
“Nicholas, are you leaving me – leaving us – for the fucking Tooth Fairy?”
The shock of her words wrestled his eyes from the window and returned them to his wife. He noticed in a flash that the shock wasn’t primarily from the enormity of what she had just asked him, but from the fact that she had actually cursed. He could not remember her ever having done that before, even when she’d burned her hands on the tiny, awkward pies she used to make as treats for the elves to eat while they celebrated their Sunday Sabbath.
“Anna, it’s not like that.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” she said as she rose from the table and went to the kitchen.
He forked his last bits of egg and swirled them around his plate in an attempt to get at every last atom of hot sauce. As he chewed his last bite, he again looked out the window at the massive whiteness that surrounded him. He chewed, and then he felt a sudden revulsion toward his bulging gut and his tired tag line, his clichéd Ho!Ho!Ho!
He looked out beyond the garages that housed his two dozen sleighs. He looked out beyond the bunk houses that billeted the elves who shoveled reindeer shit and catalogued his toy orders in vast data bases.
As he gazed a song lyric wrote itself across the inside of his skull. He had heard the lyric sung by Johnny Cash, but he thought someone else had written the song. But the way Cash sung it was the way he felt it, and so he was glad he didn’t know the original.
He mumbled the words under his breath: “What have I become / My sweetest friend / Everyone I know goes away / In the end / And you could have it all / My empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt.”
“What did you say, Nicolas?” Anna had returned from the kitchen and was clearing the dishes. She looked unsteady on her feet, another rarity to go with her cursing.
“Nothing, Sweetie.” He said nothing more after that. He wanted to, but he couldn’t – not yet. There would be more than enough time for talk. That was cold comfort for her, he knew this, but it was all he had to give.
In the silence he continued to stare out into the bleak distance, and he noted that saying the lyrics, even if just to himself, had made him feel lighter, at least a little.
And now he thought he heard a noise roll into his breakfast room from far away. It sounded like the great cracking crash of glacial ice collapsing into the hungry mouth of a warming sea. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was the crash of the surf against a Turkish shore.
Either possibility meant uncertainty, but this was not the same as being afraid. He was not afraid.