Saturation Point

The only people in New York City who look up are the tourists. They're looking at the buildings, though, not at the sky. They don't even think about the sky. Not him; he knows the sky is up there. That's why he refuses to look up.

He looked up all the time as a boy growing up on a farm in Mississippi. Weather matters to farmers. They learn to pay attention to cloud formations, to the color of the sky, to the direction of the wind, to the humidity. They go to church and pray for good weather. He learned to see the inherent beauty of weather. He perceived a sense of dramatic inevitability, an implacable but undeniably loveliness even in the most chaotic weather systems, a deep sense of order underlying it all.

He went to college and studied meteorology. He looked at books, he looked at maps and charts, he looked at graphs of annual precipitation, he looked at doppler radar screens and computer simulations. And every day he went outside and look up at the sky.

After college he got a job as a television weatherman in Biloxi. It paid well and he was happy. It was important work, he thought, telling working folks what sort of weather to expect the next day. He didn't stay at that station long. He was a black man who could speak like a white man, he was clever and amusing, and he could read naturally off a teleprompter. Nobody was surprised when he was offered a job by a New York station.

He moved to New York. After a year or so he met and married a lawyer who was born in Jamaica. They bought a townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood in Harlem. He bought his wife a custom-made bed and in that bed they made a daughter. He looked at his family, he looked at the camera, he looked at the teleprompter and he smiled as he read the weather report. He never looked back and he stopped looking up.

His daughter was killed two months before her fifth birthday. She'd wanted to walk down to the park. While his wife fetched her hat, the child waited on the front stoop. A man walking his Rottweiler passed by and she reached out suddenly to pet the dog. The dog, startled by the motion, seized her by the upper arm. His wife, hearing the screams, rushed out. She saw the man trying to wrestle the dog away. She ran into the kitchen, called 911, and grabbed a Henkel chef's knife. Outside, her daughter had stopped screaming but the dog still refused to let go. She began to stab the dog. The dog's owner tried to stop her, so she stabbed him too. The police officers responding to her 911 call saw a woman stabbing a man, and shot her.

He was at work when it happened, explaining to visiting school children why it rained. He explained how warm air causes the water in rivers, lakes and oceans to evaporate. The water vapor rises in the air. The temperature of the air falls as you go higher. There's only so much water vapor the air can hold at any given temperature and when the water vapor exceeds that point, it begins to rain. The point at which it can't take any more is called the saturation point.

He couldn't understand why his family was dead. He tried to analyze it logically. He searched for some underlying sense of order to it. But he couldn't find it. He quit his job. He sold the townhouse. He tore apart the custom-made bed and constructed a crude cross from the bedframe.

Now he walks the streets of New York City, refusing to look up at the sky...even when it rains.

posted by greg @ 2:14 PM