In the backyard of his brand-new, post-divorce tiny house, David Cale is stuck up to his armpits in a compost barrel. Is it possible, he wonders, for a human body to decompose while still alive? He feels one of the 100 red composting worms he ordered online from Uncle Drew’s Worm Farm coiling python-like around his big toe. Or could it be the single earthworm he dug up in his vegetable garden just this morning and threw in with the others? It was fine and well for the 100 composting worms—they were bred for such a life. But the earthworm perhaps had other plans for the day before being conscripted for hard labor. Now he’s exacting revenge.
Twenty minutes ago, David was interrupted from his reading by the chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee of a black-capped chickadee who’d wedged her little leg between the solar-paneled roof and the gutters. Not owning a ladder, David climbed up on a compost barrel that stood against the side of the house. It seemed sturdy. But after freeing the bird, he adjusted his footing and somehow kicked up the lid of the barrel and fell through, sinking into the mucky compost. The barrel was tall and thin: just wide enough to fall through but too narrow to pull himself out of.
The stench of decay floods David’s mind with associations. Cold, impersonal darkness…his body enveloped in dirt…101 worms worming in and out of his hollow skull. Forty-nine years old, and what has he accomplished? A mediocre career selling bonds, a failed marriage, a seventeen-year-old son who—well, who knows what Joey thinks of him now?
If there’s anything that David prides himself on, it’s this: He cares deeply about the planet. You couldn’t say the same about his ex, Robin, a vain, status-obsessed, advertising agent. Back when they were together, he forbade her and their son Joey from bringing anything sold in plastic into the house. Robin took to calling him “Benito Musso-greenie.” The extent of Robin’s concern about humanity? How to make people think they need things they don’t need—things manufactured in sweatshops, things that harm the planet. For Robin, material success justified her existence. For David, it was a heavy crown. They compromised on investing in ESGs, but she viciously resisted any lifestyle change requiring the slightest sacrifice. Thus, their irreconcilable differences.
Also, David hadn’t been able to get it up in years.
To her credit, Robin approached the problem with gentleness and delicacy… at first. She knew he was really upset about the planet, she said. She felt for him. But she was still a woman. She had needs. Besides, if he was feeling so low-down all the time, why not get help for it? Therapy? Pills? He didn’t have to live like this.
She suggested marriage counseling. Later she demanded it. During their first session, the therapist asked David if he understood why Robin was upset.
“I do,” he said. “She resents me for reminding her that our planet is fucked.”
Robin huffed and puffed, and the therapist reminded David that Robin’s complaint was actually a good deal more nuanced than that. “She’s upset that, in your despair over climate change, you haven’t been attentive to her needs.”
“The thing is…” he began. And then the words came tumbling out of his mouth like a poem he knew by heart. “I think deep down I can’t separate the mating act from the thought of bringing a child into this dogshit world of ours.”
“But you got snipped after we had Joey!” snapped Robin.
“The mind’s a funny thing,” he said, shrugging. It was a theory he’d been kicking around for the past few months. Staring so long at the stark truth of climate change had simply mortified his sex drive. Did his body understand that he’d gotten a vasectomy a decade earlier, or that Robin was past menopause? No. As far as his body was concerned, making love amounted to passing your seed into an environment that was hostile to human life. Which was a piss poor biological legacy.
“Mark my words,” he continued. “When coastal cities have all gone the way of Atlantis and all the great forests of the world have turned to ash, and whoever’s left to tell the tale will need breathing apparatuses to survive—We’ll just see how horny you are then!”
“Clearly, you’re both in very different stages of your sexual journeys,” said the therapist. “But there’s no reason to think it’s a permanent problem. What I’m hearing, David, is that you have a lot of perfectly understandable anxieties about the state of the world. I’d recommend, however, that you work with an individual counselor to develop strategies for coping with those anxieties. In the meantime, the two of you might consider exploring the idea of an open marriage.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
Oh???? thought David, panicking. He couldn’t breathe. His mind immediately conjured an image of Robin in bed with their neighbor Mike, a lifelong bachelor who hosted the neighborhood pool party every summer and whose pecs David had overhead Robin giggling about with the other women. In his mind, the two lovebirds were swaddled like babies in red satin sheets with black trim—Mike laughing hysterically as Robin impersonated her neurotic and sexless husband. The two of them took turns wriggling their fingers to signify David’s impotence.
“I don’t think I love you anymore,” David blurted out. “We should get a divorce.”
Chicka-dee-dee, sings the black-capped chickadee, looking down on David from the nearby tree branch she’s been perched on since he’d freed her from the gutter. “Dear one, it pains me to see you suffering,” she sings. Chicka-dee-dee-dee. “I wish I could return the favor, but alas, I am only a bird.” Chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee. “I hope that my presence is a small comfort to you.”
David hears the sputtering exhaust of Joey’s old Mazda pulling into the driveway. Saved at last, sweet Jesus! He’d forgotten that Joey was planning to swing by after soccer practice to check out the new house. The car door slams, and here come footsteps down the gravel path, the shadow of the gate swinging open across the green lawn––and here’s Joey: baby blue gym shirt, soccer shorts, the imprint of shin guards on his flushed skin.
Seeing his father poking out of a plastic barrel like some sad, little Jack-in-the-box, Joey double-takes. “Dad? What are you doing?”
“I’m stuck.”
“How did you—”
“I was helping—nevermind, can you just go in through the sliding door there and grab the lotion from the bathroom?”
Joey whips his phone out—he’s taking a picture, he’s laughing. “Tell me how you got stuck again?” No, not a picture, a video.
“Goddammit Joey, go get the fucking lotion! Now!”
Still laughing, still filming, Joey saunters over to the sliding door and disappears into the house. “Where is the bathroom?”
“It’s a tiny house! There are like two doors!”
“Okay, okay!”
David looks up at the chickadee, who still lingers in the branch. “What a shame!” she sings. “Children can be so ungrateful.” A burst of affection for the little bird swells in David’s chest. Yes, children can be so ungrateful.
Though, if he’s being honest with himself, he could have given the boy more to be grateful for. In decorating the new house, David had framed a picture from Joey’s eighth birthday party—laser tag. In the picture, Joey is all decked out in the target vest, looking like a Ghostbuster. David is pointing a finger gun at the camera. But the real story of the picture is in the rolled-up paper tucked into the waistband of his jeans, an article about offshore wind farming he’d printed out from the internet to read while Joey and his friends did the laser tag thing.
Joey returns through the sliding door, carrying a gray tub of margarine.
“Best I could find,” he says.
“What? No! There’s lotion in the medicine cabinet.”
“I checked there. This will work just as well.”
“Fine, just—”
Joey slathers gobs of margarine onto his father’s chest and back. David wiggles and turns…and then, yes, he seems to be moving, doesn’t he?
“Okay, just gently lower the barrel to the ground, and I should be able to crawl out.”
Joey starts to pull the barrel down the ground, but just when he’s about to reach the ground, he loses his grip and David’s head slams against the grass and then he’s rolling, down, down, down the sloping backyard alternately glimpsing the blue sky and filling his mouth with grass and dirt.
Oh, the look on Joey’s face when he asked his dad to play a round with him! But David hadn’t yet finished reading the article. Oh, the look on the boy’s face when he said no!
“I can’t believe I didn’t get that on video,” Joey says afterwards.
They are inside now, sitting on David’s bamboo-and-hemp couch. David can’t stop squirming. The constant motion assures his body that it is free.
“But listen, Dad. There’s something I came here to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“You know my girlfriend, Aniah? You met her at my game a few—”
“Of course! How could I forget? Great girl.”
“She’s pregnant.”
David blinks and feels his breath rattling around his body like a pinball, even hears the pew-pew noises from the X-Files pinball machine at the campus laundromat where he met Robin thirty years earlier. He remembers her black denim mini-skirt and her matte lipstick.
“Dad? Can you, like, say something please?”
“I think I’d like to go back in the barrel now.”
“Wowwww,” says Joey, slapping his knees and laughing bitterly. “Father of the year! What could possibly go wrong with a dad like you to learn from?”
“What do you want me to say, Joey? This is a fucking disaster. What about college? Your soccer scholarship? How are you in any place to raise a kid?”
“Well…I was thinking I’d defer my admission, for a year at least. I’ll lose the scholarship, but that’s life, fine. I’ll go up to full time at the coffee shop, I’ll….”
David’s pulse is a war drum in his throat. Chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.
“And have you discussed… other possibilities?”
“She wants to have it. And I do too.”
David closes his eyes to collect himself. He sees the earthworm poking its head out of his eye socket. In a nearly steady voice, he says, “Even in the best of circumstances, bringing a child into this world, into this future, is just, it’s pure horror.”
“Was that how you felt when you had me?”
“Of course not!” David recalls Robin’s woo-hooing from the bathroom of their first apartment; how she came running out, waving the pregnancy test like a magic wand; how life had never felt so improbably wonderful as it did in that moment. The memory leaves a residue of joy that spreads across his body like a slow tide. It scares him.
Now he’s rising from the couch and turning away from Joey. He looks through the sliding glass door into the gloaming, the shadows, the silhouetted chickadee still fidgeting in her tree. Finally, he shakes his head and says, “I think we should all—each and every one of us—hold hands and walk into a lake. Isn’t that the decent thing to do? Give the orcas and polar bears and the earthworms a fighting chance at carrying on?”
“If you really believe that, why bother with composting and solar panels? Why rescue a bird? Why prolong life on a doomed planet? You’re still rooting for life.”
Once again, David’s mind returns to Robin and the matte lipstick she was wearing that day in the laundromat—yes, and the smudged green eyeshadow and the candy-red glow of her bra straps beneath her Nirvana tank top. Boy was it something to lust after a girl like that—and then, weeks later, to stumble kissing up the stairs to his dorm, to be thrown onto the mustard yellow futon, troubled by nothing but how to make bliss last forever.
