Martin woke up at 6:15 in the morning, more out of habit than anything. Immediately he stood up and made his queen-sized bed. The Union had been on strike for two weeks so he didn’t have to be at the factory until 9:30 when the picketing started. Martin yawned and padded down the hall in his bare feet. It was not yet dawn, so he turned on all the lights as he went. He liked his shower hot from the moment he got in so he set it running before going into his son’s room. Everything in the room was in perfect order, but Martin straightened things up anyway. He remade the already made bed and arranged the pictureframes on the dresser just so. Since Martin’s wife moved out, their son Brian had been staying at her new condo. But Martin still went through the same routine in the morning; habit has a tendency of overcoming common sense.
After his shower, Martin turned on all the lights in the house and the television in order to chase the pre-dawn darkness outside where it belonged. In the kitchen he scooped some fresh coffee grounds into the machine, filled its belly with water, and pressed “BREW.” He fetched the paper from the stoop and sat in front of the early morning cycles of the 24 hour news. A panel of various experts was discussing global warming. It was a slow news day.
Martin excised the sports section of the paper as a bespectacled head on the TV expounded a theory that global warming “existed completely beyond human control” and was actually caused by solar flares. The head claimed that the illusion of heightened global temperatures threatening civilization was actually a statistical trick, and the entire problem of ‘global warming’ existed in only our minds.
While reading the chart of weekend baseball statistics, Martin partially absorbed the noise of the television the same way he used to absorb his wife’s early morning chatter. The onscreen display of the 24 hour news station was buzzing with information, and Martin’s mind mirrored that same hectic style. A mental anchor read him the baseball scores aloud in his head, while impressions of the morning’s early weather displayed graphically on the top right. And ideas of global warming, influenced by the shouting voices on the TV, scrawled across the bottom ticker of his brain. He went on reading.
But slowly the fervid twist of all Martin’s thoughts subtly grew into one single idea. By small degrees, this idea arose and articulated itself into existence. Martin began to wonder, to no one in particular, certain unordinary things:
“The world used to be dark at night,” he thought. “Baseball used to be a daytime sport. The players had to clock out at five like the rest of us. But now there are lights. Now thick and hungry wiring slithers under the ground and then stretches through the air, bustling with wattage. At first we tamed the lightning into cables, but now it surrounds us—above and below—containing us in the web-like tangle of an electric cage. Baseball stadiums are meccas of energy, drawing in devout volts…”
Martin let the newspaper fall onto his lap with a light rustle. His eyes, under knitted brows, stared at nothing. Two and a half weeks the Autoworker’s Union had been on strike; Martin hadn’t done his job for two and a half weeks. A hard-working man—when deprived of his hard work—will start to produce automotive little thoughts instead of producing cars. Like a single star in the sky surging with excess energy, the explosions of Martin’s mind multiplied on top of one another:
“I remember when I took Brian to his first nightgame. Wires from all directions must have fed a billion filaments inside a million bulbs and they silently shined onto the field with a cool electric hum. Brian noticed how the players on the team didn’t cast any shadows, which was pretty impressive for such a little kid to notice. The diamond existed in some impossible reality, full of a light that radiated from everywhere but had no source. The awesome power of a man-made sun.”
His thoughts grew in scale and Martin’s mind chugged onward.
“The world used to be dark at night. But this planet has been spinning like a rotisserie for eons. Dead plants and animals have been cooked into a thick underground oil and flaky deposits of coal. And now, in the night, we harvest old sunshine to tide us over until morning. The streetlights must be powered, the darkness will not get a hold. It is a matter of safety for my family, for everyone’s family.”
The television rattled off statistics about the increasing rates of global temperatures and a computer animated cartoon demonstrated how fossil fuels push warming chemicals into the air.
“This is my fault,” thought Martin. “For years I’ve tried to teach Brian responsibility, and now what do I have to say for myself? This Earth was just starting to live before we aged it. Before I aged it.”
Suddenly Martin looked up and noticed things in his living room that had become unnoticeable through his daily habits. Nothing seemed fine. All the lamps glowed like supergiants. They aligned themselves into a constellation, depicting an ancient god of the apocalypse. The dawn set in and sunshine began to fill the room like a flood. All the walls became brighter and brighter, all things coming into a clearer light. Every powered machine turned into a laughing monster that craved the Earth’s soul, and power outlets squealed like the snouts of insatiable swine. The way he ran his shower in the morning, the nights he fell asleep in front of the TV, automobiles that he manufactured with his own hands; all these innocent parts of Martin’s ordinary life turned to horrors before him.
How could he explain to his son that he built a hundred four-seater devils everyday that accomplished nothing and spewed poison? And now he and his Union were on strike (this seemed ridiculous to him now) in order to demand more money for these undoings. That old doubt that had nagged his mind for years, like an un-oilable squeak in the cogs, now screamed for attention again, “Am I as good an example to Brian as my father was to me?
“When I was a child my father had fixed the world, not broken it. He and an army of superdads had disciplined the fascism out of Europe. The environment was incidental and global warming non-existent. My dad had earned the right to ride a sputtering pickup truck down fast forest roads, the flakes of rust on its shell matching the daily-changing autumn leaves. And me with my little boy’s head out the window, I smelled the crisp afternoon air mix with the unmistakable stream of fresh gasoline fumes pouring from the cracks around the hood.”
Martin then willed himself to drift pack into the present. He thought “That truck used to mean the world to me. How can it have been the thing that killed the Earth? Surely we can all forgive just one pickup, on one fall day, over 30 years ago. But all the dads in all the pickups on all the back roads—an army of them—chugging chemicals into the sky, they cannot all be absolved. All of them together are to blame, it wasn’t on purpose…
“How can I explain to my son that the world I’m leaving him is dying? It is my fault and my waste, but not really. It is everyone’s fault and so it is no one’s fault. I hate to admit it but, over time, I guess I’ve gotten used to explaining the unfairness of the world to Brian. Like when I had to tell him that his mother and I were getting divorced. ‘It isn’t my fault and it isn’t her fault. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t your fault. This problem isn’t your fault.’ His parents are broken up and the Earth too. I’ve loved the boy since his first breath of atmosphere, and now the whole thing’s poisoned.”
Depression rung through Martin’s chest, and he wished for the innocence that his father had in that pickup all those years ago. “There is so much information nowadays,” he thought, “so many ways to blame yourself. It’s too much for one person, too much for me.”
Martin pressed his palms over his eye sockets and thought for a moment that he was going to cry. But he soon calmed himself. Like that flash attack of panic when you catch your foot while running downstairs and almost—but just almost—throw your skeleton down the steps’ jagged corners, this feeling too subsided. The sun crawled higher and the room grew ever brighter, but Martin took a deep breath, laughed a little at himself, and pretended that his hands didn’t feel like shaking jelly. He figured it was just stress that made him think this way. The house was too empty of his son’s presence and too full of his wife’s memory. But before dropping the matter altogether one final thought crossed his mind, like a shadow passing over a blank white wall and then disappearing into the air:
“A new century is beginning,” he chanted in his head, “a new millennium. Though years are just arbitrary numbers set to some ancient birthday, their implications are hard to ignore. The clock has been reset and we are gearing up for a new era. Two thousand. Oh One. Oh Two. Oh Three…
“Just as the first years of the twentieth century built up to its great challenges—The Great Depression, The War to End All Wars, etc.—a new generation is being forged in this century’s early flames. Economic tumult and war. Perhaps hardship will teach them a responsibility that my father seemed to have. It had better. They are their own only hope.”
Then the unnecessary but useful little light on the coffee machine clicked, and Martin got up to pour himself a cup.
