Earthquakes.
Two more had struck in the quake-ravaged country of Taiwan within a week of another in Turkey. Thom Sanders was perplexed, interested and terrified all at the same time. Sure, the news was saying it was normal and that everything was okay. That was what they wanted you to think, he thought to himself.
But it wasn’t just earthquakes. He had seen the weather on The Weather Channel. He watched and tracked each of the Hurricanes with each new hurricane season. They were getting bigger and more frequent. This scared him too.
And then there was the war. Or wars, to be exact. First it was the Middle East. Then it was Russia and Georgia. Shortly after that it was North Korea and South Korea, which was followed by India and Pakistan. It was chaos all over the world.
He fretted about this and everything else as he watered the flowers. It had not rained in weeks. The garden was dry, the grass was dying and the water rations prevented him from giving his beloved plants the moisture they deserved.
He had bought the house three years ago when the market was down a bit and was able to secure a wonderful mortgage rate on a modestly restored colonial home from the turn of the century. It was his pride and joy next to his garden and since his retirement three years ago he was always spending time working in or on one or the other.
A bee buzzed by his nose intent on heading toward the roses. He watched the small insect fly erratically, as if drunk, until it zeroed in on the largest rose on the bush and then landed to harvest the nectar.
It was so hot lately, he thought to himself. This had to be abnormal. More of the global warming for certain, he thought. He wiped the sweat from his brow and wiped his dirty hands off on his khaki shorts, knowing that it would be hell to get the stains out later. He hated washing. It reminded him of Mary.
Mary had died four years ago. She passed only two weeks after his retirement and somehow that had left a gap that had never quite filled since. They had planned to buy an RV and travel the states, see relatives, those sorts of things. He still had the brochure for an RV they both decided to buy but never did. Those plans were gone now.
He walked in the house, careful to remove his shoes so as to not scar the newly installed wood flooring, and turned on the TV. It was on CNN like always. He switched back and forth between CNN, Fox (when he felt conservative) and NBC. NBC had a good anchorman, he thought. He seemed smart and intelligent and he always raised his eyes when he said something important. Thom liked those things about him and that was why he chose to watch NBC on occasion.
CNN had an eyewitness reporter at the scene of the Montseraut Volcano were activity had resumed just last week and an eruption was expected any day. He watched on the television as foreign people he would never know packed their things and left their village in droves not knowing if they might ever return. Not knowing if they would have a house to come back to. He felt their pain and he empathized with their plight and he worried for them and he hoped that helped things.
He got up from the recliner and fixed himself a glass of water. He had bought a new filtration system last month for over $800. The salesman said it reduced all metal content and other harmful substances, which were implicitly tied to cancer, liver disease and all kinds of other nasty things. He believed the man and had the money to buy it so he did. The water still tasted the same he thought as he took a small drink.
He walked back into the living room. The CNN reporters were now discussing the situation in the Middle East with an “expert on Middle Eastern Affairs” with some name he couldn’t pronounce. He listened for about five minutes until he realized that basically they all agreed things were getting worse. This worried him too and he felt that the world was such a small place and that something imminent and dreadful was going to happen soon. He took another drink of water thinking that maybe he should watch sports tonight instead.
It wasn’t just the earthquakes, wars and volcanoes that bothered him. Those were just a few, of many things that he had noticed. Things that were unusual, taking place in the environment outside of what has always been considered normal activity.
Sunspots were way above normal. Weather continued to exhibit unusual patterns such as out of season occurrences of snow and warm weather. Certain species of animals were dying off for no discernible reason and others seemed to be doing what could best be described as behavioral suicide. Astronomers were finding peculiar anomalies in the orbits of planets and discovering quasars, brown dwarfs and black holes were they should not be. And it didn’t stop there. No, something was definitely going wrong and it worried him though he was not a man known to worry. He knew that whatever was happening was something entirely too big to do anything about other than simply sit and watch – and pray if one was inclined to such behavior.
The phone rang. He slowly put his cigarette down silently cussing himself for starting to smoke again. He was sixty-six years old and hadn’t smoked since he quit the first time at forty-five until about a year ago. He woke up one day with a desire to taste a cigarette. He gave into that desire and he wasn’t dissatisfied that he did. He liked the taste and smoking calmed his nerves.
“George, this is Patricia. It’s about Tommy.” Tommy was his oldest son. He had moved to Wisconsin three years ago, because he was offered the option of transferring to one of three locations and Wisconsin was the one he chose for the additional money he would receive for being geographically flexible. Patricia was his mother. They had married young, before they knew any better. It didn’t last long. Tommy was the only good thing that had come of it.
“Yeah, how’s he doing Pat?” He asked, expecting to hear that he was getting married or that maybe he had gotten a promotion, or that perhaps he had decided to move back home, to Ohio.
She didn’t reply immediately, which caused him a concern that he didn’t get a chance to articulate, in his head as he thought about the significance of it.
Pat was breathing. In and out. Deep and slow as if to calm her nerves. He watched a fly weave its way among and between the vase and the picture of Tommy and Pat and him when they were all much younger. The fly came to rest on the edge of the picture, near the top right corner. It was brass and needed polished.
Pat inhaled sharply like she was going to take all the air back in and blow up like some balloon and float up into the sky above. Her voice was trying to communicate something to him but he couldn’t make much out other than the words, “Tommy”, “Oh my god” and “Why.” She sobbed and tried to breathe and he was reminded of the time when they first met, back in ’63, when they were both young and the lives they lead now were as distant as the moon or Saturn.
“He’s dead Thom.” His son was named Thomas too. Pat had always called him Tommy when he was younger and never could quit doing it by the time he was older and asked her to stop.
There was a silence on the phone between the two of them that was pierced by the CNN reporter talking about a volcano that had erupted and how it had killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 people. Thom tried to imagine that and weigh it against the loss of his only son but he couldn’t make it happen. He felt powerless and weak in the face of death and its finality and he wished that the sky would swallow him up.
“How did it happen? When? When did it happen, Pat?” His voice betrayed mild panic now though he tried to stay calm and be strong since he knew Pat was weak now and that if he was strong maybe she could be too.
“It was an accident at the plant. He was driving the lift and somehow it flipped. He ended up underneath it.”
Thom sat there, unable to fathom the reality of the loss of his only son. He kept watching the news, and the thousands of the people’s lives devastated by the volcanic eruption.
“Thanks for telling me Pat. When is the funeral?”
“It will be on Monday.”
“I will see you then.” He quickly hung up the phone, unable to find anything else to say to ease her pain or his own.
He suddenly felt overwhelmed and in despair. How was he going to live with this loss?
He looked on the screen again. A reporter was interviewing someone in front of the remains of houses that were once part of a village. The woman’s face was partially covered in ash as she tried to talk despite her despair.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying but he imagined the reporter asking her questions about how she would cope and how terrible the tragedy was for her and how lucky she was that it wasn’t her. What did they want from her Thom wanted?
He thought about that question as he began packing his things for a weekend away in which he would bury his only son.
What did the reporter want to hear from her?
“How does it feel to lose those you love in a tragedy that makes no sense?”
“It hurts for a while. A long while. Maybe for months, maybe for years. The truth is it never goes away. It stays inside of you and haunts you even in the moments you find peace.”
“How do you get past it? What do you do to ease the pain?”
“You don’t get past it. You keep on keeping on because that is all there is to do. You do it because your pain has been felt before and somehow those people made it through and that means you can too.”
He felt that it was something like this that the reporter really wanted her to say, that he wanted to hear her say.
He wondered if maybe his own fascination with tragedy wasn’t preparing him for this. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
He went outside and watered the plants, making sure to see that the water seeped down to the roots, knowing he would be gone for several days.
He felt closer to humanity with his loss and he no longer felt the need to watch the tragedy of other lives because now he had his own. He wondered what he could find to take up his time now that CNN no longer seemed that appealing as he put the car into gear, backed out of his driveway and began the long drive to St. Louis and the funeral in which he would say goodbye to the only son he ever knew.
