On Monday morning, Artur woke up at 5:00, took a quick shower, shaved, and got into his car without packing a bag. He was dressed in old, loose slacks, plaid shirt, and a fleece pullover. His usual weekend attire. But the weekend has ended over five hours ago.
For the last seven months, since October, at this hour on any Monday, he would still be in bed. The alarm would wake him up at 6:00. By 7:30, Artur would be on his way to work, wearing a cheap suit and a dress shirt which would be sweaty by the time he reached the Institute.
Until seven months ago, before October, at this hour every Monday, he would still be in bed, except his wife would be next to him. It would be her, not the alarm clock, who would wake him up, and not at 6:00, but at 6:30, and it would be her who would pack an extra shirt for the Institute. And a sandwich.
Artur had never driven to work. He took public transportation. His work started at 8:30, exactly the time when work would start for at least half a million people in town. It wasn’t the weather that made Artur sweaty. It was the body heat of others stuck on the bus with him. In winter and in the warmer months.
For the last seven months, there had been no other body in his bed except his. Before last October, his wife’s body would be there, and it was balmy. But the first Sunday of that month, it took his wife’s body temperature almost twenty hours to drop and match the ambient temperature of the room. It would’ve taken a bit less if he hadn’t held her tight in his arms. The temperature measured exactly 18 degrees Celsius. It was quite nice for the room. For his wife, it meant she was no longer alive.
So, taking the car this particular Monday was new. And Artur was not even going to work. He was going to the sea. Nearly three hundred kilometers from home.
Artur drove trying not to think. There was nothing to think about, really, Artur thought. He focused on the splatting of bugs on the windshield. The splatting came without a set cadence, but the tempo increased the farther north he went. First came the soft splats of mosquitoes. Later, some bigger bugs plopped, leaving a blot. For every plop there were five or six splats. Periodically, an insect would splash with a crunch. It was all very amusing.
Splat, Artur said. Splat, splat. Plop. This went on for a while.
By the time he passed the halfway point, the windshield was plastered with bugs. The splotches didn’t really obstruct his view. Besides, there was hardly any traffic. It was still early.
Suddenly, a thick, round insect smashed into the glass right in front of his eyes. Crrraaack, echoed Artur. All the little body parts were there, trembling in the wind, slowly spreading apart in a blob of ooze. Artur finally turned on the wipers. The blades moved left and right, dry-heaving all the gunk into a brown-yellow abstraction. He pulled on the windshield washer lever, but there was no fluid left.
Artur considered pulling over and wiping it all clean with a squeegee, but didn’t do it. He could still see enough through the smudges. He decided to take a break at the next gas station. To fuel up, take a restroom break, and to get some wiper fluid.
He was entering the lake country. The freeway cut through some timid hills with farmland on each side, sometimes forest, then more farmland. No lake was ever visible. But the bugs were there, the swampy kind mostly, and plenty of little mosquitoes.
The morning traffic was intensifying. Artur noticed that the cars going in the opposite direction were all wet. Cresting another hill, he saw a bulging dark cloud. The cloud was perched on a wide, barely transparent block. The block was even darker than the cloud. It was a wall of rain and Artur was heading straight for it.
He liked driving through rain. There was something musical about it. When he entered the block of water, it came down on the car full force all at once. Artur immediately turned on the wipers, and set them to top speed. It took less than ten seconds for the windshield to be clean again. Except for the abdomen of some insect which refused to budge.
The wiper metronome was going phoo-tooh, phoo-tooh over the warbling rain. Artur’s fingers instinctively started to tap on the steering wheel. They harmonized with the wipers for a short time, until he became aware of it. When he tried a clever drum solo, he went out of synch.
The block of rain ended suddenly, and the sky was clear again. Everything was clear and sparkling, and the tires were whooshing on the wet road. There was no more abstraction on the windshield, just a pristine view. Even that one stubborn abdomen was now gone.
He checked the fuel gauge, and it was half-full. The insects seemed to be wiped out from the world entirely. He decided to press on, and refuel on his way back.
He knew the road well. He knew there was a large hardware store on the outskirts of town coming up. That’s where he needed to get off the freeway anyway, and take a country road to the sea. After getting a few supplies.
He and his wife would take the very same route once a year to visit her parents and spend a few days by the sea. The parents were Kashubian, and lived in a small village about twenty kilometers from the Baltic. Artur liked them a lot. They were still there. But there was no point driving through the village now, although Artur felt a pull in that direction. He did his best to resist it.
Now that the bugs were gone and the rain stopped playing, it was hard for Artur to think in abstractions. Faint images started to splat randomly behind his eyes, in blurry vignettes and in vistas, leaking out, looking for a pretext to evolve into memories, to find form, the kind of form that was no good for Artur, no good at all, and he tried his best to prevent the leakage.
The big hardware store was right off the ramp, surrounded by other big stores. Artur pulled into the vast parking lot which was still nearly empty. Which was good, as he could park close to the store’s exit.
He purchased two steel buckets, a smaller plastic one, a small shovel, and a bag of quick-setting cement. He had the shopping list memorized since Friday.
On Friday, Artur had lost his job. He had been a data analyst at a molecular biology institute for eight years. It wasn’t a sudden blow. In fact, he and his wife had discussed his quitting the job over a year ago. They were more than aware that algorithms were going to take over sooner than later. The Institute would probably offer him a transitional position. A machine learning specialist to teach the AI his old job, or, at best, some kind of data managing position. Both of which he didn’t quite qualify for, nor had any inclination to pursue. He felt that by anticipating the layoff with quitting would constitute a small victory.
After his wife died unexpectedly of sudden cardiac arrest, Artur gave up the notion of quitting altogether. He continued to take the bus to the Institute. Removing noise from data, sleuthing for missing values, normalizing, optimizing, number crunching, all that was, to Artur, comfortably routine. He liked it when everything clicked, he liked consistency. It was soothing. So, he soothed himself for as long as he could, with overtime, sometimes on weekends, instinctively, until it became obvious to him what was obvious to everyone who knew about his sudden loss, that his zeal was just a distraction, and once he saw through that, the distraction turned into a nuisance, and he started to feel angry at himself for not being honest, for lying to himself for seven months, day in, day out, about the grief he couldn’t unleash, until on Friday the Institute made him a transitional offer to teach the AI his job, and that’s when he quit without feeling victorious.
The single-lane country road was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. But there were no cars or tractors, no villagers on bikes or on foot, just a twisting corridor of late spring wheat. Artur rolled down all the windows. The world was divided into a thin strip of green on the bottom and a wide clear blue field of the sky, a beautiful two-tone flag, my flag, thought Artur, my flag for the moment, until I reach the all-blue country.
Then the corridor ended and a tunnel of pines swallowed his car. The sky was no more, just a deep ruddy forest which, Artur instantly feared, would give way to those behind-the-eyes vistas he dreaded so much.
So, he screamed.
He screamed three or four times, and it worked. No visions managed to flash through the sound barrier. But then he became aware of his own screaming, and his voice wavered to a weak moan. He needed a new distraction.
He looked at the trees to the left. Their trunks were strobing. He looked forward and focused on one pine still a fair distance away. He didn’t take his eyes off it until he passed it. Swoooosh. He focused on another tree. Swoooosh. He played that game a few more times. It was amusing enough.
Then he saw one single birch tree coming around the bend. Its zebra trunk punched out from the colonnade of brown pines. What would the birch hear, Artur thought. Passing the tree, he honked the horn. Toot, toot-toot. But the birch heard something else. It heard tooooooooooeeeeh. Of that, Artur was sure.
He looked in the rear-view mirror to see the birch one more time. He couldn’t find it. When his eyes returned to the road ahead, Artur felt he could try another game.
He began to imagine his wife’s face. But the face refused to crystallize, dodging his recall. It wavered between several visions, not clear enough to pin down. It was frustrating.
The memory menu offered the usual snippets, but none of them featured her face. There were plenty of moments and situations, indoor and outdoor locations, even her body was more accessible to him than her eyes, her lips, and the hair. Now that he really wanted her to emerge, she refused. Why? I know why. Because she decides when to appear, not I, Artur concluded. Okay, you decide. Go on.
And with that thought, suddenly, Artur saw his wife ahead, standing among the pines, her face clearly defined.
There she is, there she is, swoooosh, and she is no more. Artur looked in the rear-view mirror just in case.
Try that again, this time with your voice, I dare you.
His wife decided to approach him again.
Passing her, Artur called out her name three times.
Mariiiiiiiiaaaaaaaa…
Is that what she’s heard? That’s what she must have heard.
And that’s when Artur burst out laughing.
He laughed for a long time at the silliness of it all. At his own silliness. He was still laughing when the car came out of the forest. He was laughing for improvising such a cheap, awful musical, and for his own hammy performance. Amateur, he scoffed.
Five minutes later, Artur pulled into a remote beach parking lot with a big grin on his face. No one was there, as expected. The beach chair rental shack was still boarded up. So was the forlorn concession stand. They haven’t been repainted in years.
He got out of the car and heard the sand crunch under his shoes. Nice. He popped the trunk and took out the buckets, the little shovel, and the bag of cement. He snorted at himself. No, I’m not deriding you, you silly, silly man. I’m merely bemused.
He stacked the buckets and put the shovel in. Then, he heaved the cement bag under his arm. Awkwardly, he carried the supplies to the concession stand.
He dropped it all by the peeling plywood wall, and stepped back. One more scenario? But not from a musical, I promise. No more maudlin doppler cantatas.
Artur sat down on the steps leading to the beach, facing the all-blue world. He slid over to make extra room. Maria decided to sit next to him, and that was wonderful. It was them watching a movie in bed again, but not a musical this time. Look at the props, Artur said. Tonight, we’re watching a sandblasted noir:
A police car arrives at the beach parking lot. A weathered officer steps out, adjusts his gun belt, and starts walking toward me. I don’t feel threatened. He has a kind face.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Hello.”
“What’s in the big bag?”
“Cement. Quick-setting cement.”
“Are you the proprietor, sir?”
“Yes, I own the bag.”
“I mean, are you the owner of the concession?”
“No, no, no. I just came to the beach.”
“And the buckets? And the shovel?”
“I was going to build a castle.”
“A castle, sir?”
“Yes, a castle. Like a sand castle, but with cement.”
“And why would you want to do that, sir?”
“Because a cement castle would survive.”
“Survive what, sir?”
“Have you ever built a sand castle, officer?”
“Well, yes. Of course, I did.”
“Where is it now?”
“Well, it’s no more. It got washed out by the sea.”
“A cement castle will survive anything.”
“Is this lady with you, sir?”
“What lady?”
The scene ended. Artur was looking at the blank screen of the cobalt sky. Still no clouds. The sea was sending in lazy waves. They were barely swelling.
Artur walked back to the concession stand. He picked up the cement bag and the steel buckets, and put them back in the trunk of his car. Then, he took off his shoes and socks, and tossed them into the back seat. He rolled up his pants to just below the knees.
With the small plastic bucket in one hand and the little shovel in the other, he returned to the beach.
Were Maria and Artur used to building half of the sand castle each...?
;-)
Glad he put the cement back in the car, good ending!