A Man Looking At The Sky
After several days of heavy rain, the sun had come out. Everything was moist and glittering, and there was even a hint of warmth in the late autumn sunshine - a hint of warmth on the skin and at the same time a sort of penetrating dampness. He had come out of his house because he wanted to see the blue sky, which was peppered with the remainder of the clouds, breaking apart and being blown away. He touched the dew that was dripping from one of three decorative butterflies that were attached to the exterior of his house. They were old - not incredibly old, but old enough, like his house, which in human years was no more than middle aged, but seemed dirty and somehow decrepit, to a quantity much surpassing its actual lifetime. It had been built carelessly and without love or imagination in a bygone era. He looked at the butterflies and could not envision what the original owners had thought when they put them there, what they had meant, how they could have ever seemed new, what an inadequate gesture that they had been to beautify such a hopeless house as that one, which never had the potential to be anything other than functional, and in that fatal limitation, failed even at that. He looked at the sky and the clouds and was momentarily raptured by the colors and the clarity of light. He looked at his grass on his small lawn, covered in moisture, which ended somewhat unevenly at the concrete of the sidewalk. He looked at the woman smoking at the bus stop in front of his grass - she was bent over and moving somewhat spastically - the telltale signs of the abuse of certain drugs. He wasn’t entirely sure which - crack, heroin, amphetamines, but he saw it often enough. He thought about smoking, how he had once smoked, back when everyone did - one of those symbols that designated that bygone era that was different, yet not so different from this present one. Now the only people who smoked were pariahs, and young people without identities.
He went inside again and sat at his table. He looked out the picture window to watch the woman at the bus stop who was no longer smoking but rummaging through her purse - her jerky movements spilling the contents onto the wet sidewalk - spilling out bits of paper and trash - a few makeup things, which also looked like trash to him. As this happened she cursed out into the deaf nothing, he could see her lips and face contorted in futility and frustration, and then she cried, alone on the bench.
The radio bothered him and he moved the tuner through all the stations, but didn’t like any of them - there was something sinister about the radio that he couldn’t quite put his finger on - something depressing, as if everything on it had been conceived only to half excite the human spirit, and in that half excitement, leave the spirit always suppressed, denigrated and futile - buzzing, and weak and resigned. That was his opinion about pop music and pop culture in general - it was a symbol of resignation.
His wife was away with her children, which were not his children. He was alone in the house. He thought about his wife. Many of the young people did not have wives, or husbands. They did not get married. They had different ideas - they did things differently, the young people - they moved more fluidly from person to person and didn’t seem to put much stock in being faithful. Though to his mind they didn’t seem any more free. Their sexual relaxation, he thought, or anything else they did, hadn’t been able to achieve that.
He had been with his wife for a long time, not that she had been the first. Why, he wondered had he stayed with her for so long? In retrospect there was nothing markedly different from any other he had been with - she did not have special qualities or abilities or insights. She was about as interesting as anyone else. He had no strong bonds with her children, who were not especially thoughtful or remarkable in any way - average at school, average at sports, with average, uninspired friends and boring, unrealistic aspirations - aspirations which were at best weak, and as far as he could tell, existed mainly to satisfy adults probing them about their futures and yet would no doubt play determining roles in their future choices and subsequent lives just the same.
He got some coffee from the coffee maker. The woman was now sitting - she had managed to get her things back into her bag. Her head wagged slowly and seemingly uncontrollably. He looked at the sky and his tree, with the leaves being blown off in the wind. Suddenly a strong urge came over him, to go where there were no people and no things made by people, where the smells of nature hadn’t been adulterated by the smells of human prowess and achievement.
No change was possible, not of a significant kind, he thought. Not much was possible any longer. Certainly things could be done - buildings built, incredible machines could be made, rockets, space stations, the body altered, improved - life could be made and ended. Those things could happen, and happened every day. Shallow marvels. To him they were not merely trivial but almost mindless for all their cunning. They demonstrated the human ability to improve and tinker, driven out of boredom and desire for prestige or a fear of time and annihilation. It was something difficult, of course, to create new works of engineering and science and what-have-you, but also simple. It requires only that one work hard. There was a certain amount of human ingenuity, and it could only go so far at a time, but once it had gone that far, it could stop and regain its energy and then go that far again, incrementally constructing a terrifying world of incalculable complexity. Moon bases would be possible, and human minds melding with computers would be possible and the cure for cancer would be possible, those sorts of things. He sipped his bitter cup of black coffee. He would have to stop his wife from buying the coffee he thought, because she always bought the wrong kind, the kind he had told her so many times he didn't like.
The cure for cancer is something people support. It is a political campaign completely without any ethical searching, he thought. There is no need to reflect upon ourselves. It is a battle between good and evil, without a moral dimension. It is something everyone can agree upon without risk. Cancer is mindless, he continued silently to himself, and the campaign requires only fear of death to advance. It is a struggle that requires no strong positions or defenses - that leaves everyone who takes part with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. He adjusted the coasters on his table absently, watching the sky and the clouds which were alone to him the last untouched wilderness of earth. Yet he expected that he would want such a thing if he had cancer all the same, he would probably not want to die - not like that anyway. It was a symbolically fitting way to die for our times: long, painful and undignified. We can expect those things, he thought, but not much more. You could not believe that human beings were creatures of grace and that the force of that grace would one day inexorably lead to the triumph of justice and dignity, or that the powers of the human imagination were in some way divine, capable of winning out over the dreary necessities of material existence.
The bus arrived and the woman struggled through her palsied movements to show her bus pass and then she was gone.
There are seven billion people on earth, he said to himself, a number which in decades to come will seem quaint and parochial. The thought of all of them out there created in him a palpable sense of claustrophobia. He hated them in their teeming abstraction. He went to the bathroom and then he left his house to go to the store.
The wind blew and reddened his face. He could smell the odor of salt spray brought up from the sea.
Why did he stay with his wife, he wondered? His marriage was a bulwark against the emptiness. He was no longer attractive, he was not rich, he had no status, he was not funny or enjoyable to be around, he was not even very caring. He was isolated. Without her, there would be no warm body, there would be no one to cook with, no one to care if he didn’t bathe, or ever clean the house. He would just be an isolated old man who had lost the ability to approach people or make friends, sitting alone in his filthy house or apartment - some shriveled piece of human flesh that disgusted and depressed all those who had the misfortune of being aware of him - he would become a haunting presence, a warning to all those who lived around him.
He approached the store; there was a parking lot in front of him and above it seagulls wheeled in the sky. Their calls, made eerie and distant by the wind, reminded him of when he was young - of growing up on the docks and on boats - of days spent on the ocean.
Inside the store, the owner was talking to one of the customers about some purchases that he had made on credit.
“I know you bought for fifteen dollars on Friday,” the owner said
“I didn’t buy nothing on Friday,” he replied.
“I know that you bought for fifteen dollars,” he repeated.
“I didn’t buy nothing on Friday, I swear to God.”
“Look, I know that you bought, there’s a record of it,” and then he paused for a minute “okay, it was Thursday, you bought for fifteen dollars on Thursday.”
“Look,” the customer answered, “you know better than I do.”
“You bought for fifteen dollars on Thursday,” the owner repeated.
“You know better than I do, you have it all written down.” The customer was a short man, maybe around fifty five. He was wearing dirty jeans and a dirty jean jacket. He was missing certain teeth and this gave his face a caved in look and softened his consonants. The man looked into the customer’s shopping cart to see what sort of things he was buying. They were meager items - canned meat, beans, value-brand pasta, milk and so forth. He had a vision of this person - living alone, no doubt very poor. Someone who was not very bright and thus had never managed to be very good at anything, who had never garnered the respect of his coworkers or others around him, but as a result of not being very bright, reacted in the worst way to those people’s jibes and thus made himself seem even more inept and foolish. The man imagined the way this person’s life had been shaped by decades of inarticulate shame and minor punishments. He got his milk and made a bemused expression at the cashier, as the customer's voice was still audible in the background.
After he went home with his milk, he went out again - to the waterfront. The path led past a series of houses and then down a concrete ramp. There had once been gun emplacements there, a hundred years earlier, but now they were falling apart relics, where teenagers would go drink and urinate. At the end of the ramp, there was the ocean, and beside it a granite cliff. If one continued beyond the ramp, there was a dirt path that carried on up a grassy hill that was also covered in scotch broom and blackberry bushes. Small birds lived in the bushes. The path led to to the point. The man went there. He had first visited this park with his father when he was very small. They had arrived by water in a little skiff. How large it had seemed then, and distant and mysterious. The dark pee smelling gun emplacements and the pee smelling tunnel had appeared like castles and dungeons.
The point was rocky. He sat near the water. Everything was sticky from sea-salt. Hearty tufts of grass grew out of the rocks. The air was rich with the smell of salt. Sea-gulls cried out and dove for fish in the ocean. The distant scream of an outboard motor carried across the ocean surface. Everything was bathed in the harsh golden light of late autumn, the light that reflected off the ocean and caused him to squint. The sun was nearing the snow capped mountains that were on the other side of the straight. He looked at the sky and the small clouds continued to race across the stark, blue expanse.
He imagined the north coast, where he had always meant to visit. He imagined it, not as it probably was, but vast, wild and untouched. This was where he wanted to go at that moment - the north coast with its violent storms, and everything suffused with the smell of trees and water.
Off in the distance there were houses and navy ships anchored in the bay. Tiny cars drove along the seaside highway.
He made his way home. It was dark. From his picture window, he could see though the picture window of the house across the street, into the living room. The lady who lived in the house was occupied with various chores. He watched her as she moved about, dusting and arranging in the warm, orange incandescent light. She had cried the other day after someone had accidentally run into her car, scraping the passenger door and then driven away without leaving a note. She had not cried when she learned that the man down the street had died of a heart attack - someone she had known for many years, and had worked with periodically. He knew this because he had been with her when they both found out. He had not cried either.