Otto was a simple man, some might say too simple or perhaps even describe him as mentally retarded, to use the term from an earlier, less enlightened era. The one thing he liked was heat, and therefore it was no surprise that he was one of the few who enjoyed an eternity of scorching temperatures.
Otto fancied himself a child of summer even though he didn’t swim, hike, fish, boat, or partake of the myriad activities most enjoyed in the season. Otto simply preferred the heat. He found the warmer months more comfortable in both body and mind, and even as the thermometer exceeded 90 degrees, he would sit outside in his garden and sweat, watching the flowers wilt and droop, the insects lazy in their perambulations, all other creatures hidden in the shade until the sun went down. The alternative was shorter days, less time to sit and cook up like a pleasant stew, and colder temperatures. Winters necessarily were the worst, when he was reduced to bundling up inside, looking out at a world as barren as his own mind, sometimes even as dark as the days were short and unremarkable. Snow would drive him almost into a frenzy, blanketing what little of the world was left by the ravage of the frigid weather, covering everything in a single, disgustedly pure color, from which it seemed reality might never escape. How could it? There were times he watched from his window, convincing himself that the future was entirely frozen. The snow would never, could never melt, and the rest of his life would be spent in a monochromatic hellscape while he shivered and chatted his teeth forever. Otto was not sure there truly was a hell, but if so, he imagined it as something like the Earth with a thick blanket of snow and could think of nothing worse outside of physical pain. Even then, the sight of snow hit him with something of a physical force, like a fever.
Therefore, it was no surprise that Otto was one of the few people who wasn’t particularly concerned when summer mysteriously refused to end one year in the middle of his life. Spring arrived in late March as it normally did and the days continued lengthening all the way to the summer solstice, but instead of shortening again as summer turned to fall, the sun remained high in the sky for months on end. The media, the politicians, the scientists, and the general public began chattering endlessly about it almost immediately, when their predictions for sunrise and sunset grew more and more divergent from reality starting on the very second day of summer. No one could say for sure what was happening or why, but apparently, the Northern Hemisphere remained tilted towards the sun at 23.5 degrees, even as the Earth itself continued revolving in its orbit as if nothing had changed and the normal seasons would continue apace. For whatever reason, December 21 came and went, but summer stayed on like a house guest long past its welcome, one starting to rot along with Ben Franklin’s proverbial fish, an apt metaphor considering the impact on the food supply. The northern United States lay under a haze of heat thick as any flannel blanket, smothering and suffocating the tall grass, weighing down the leaves on all the trees, and covering the land in a low lethargy one could almost see as a mist if you looked hard enough. The Southern Hemisphere, meanwhile, was locked in an eternal winter, reliving the shortest day of the year over and over again. The heat was inescapable in the north, the cold in the south, the future uncertain, the upheaval just beginning as humanity attempted to adapt to a radically changed world with no idea whether things would ever return to normal again or if this was simply the new reality. Perhaps the only thing thicker than the heat was the growing miasma of fear and desperation. This might have been a problem for everyone else, but not for Otto, at least at first. The best scientists in the world were busy trying to figure out what happened, what the impacts on the human race would be, and, more importantly, whether it could be fixed while Otto spent his days happy, hot, and sweaty in his garden, enjoying the heat as a child does a toy.
Otto was a simple man, some might say too simple or perhaps even describe him as mentally retarded, to use the term from an earlier, less enlightened era. It was not for him to ponder the big questions in life or consider the long term consequences of any problem. He couldn’t truly grasp that all the wildlife in the Northern Hemisphere had evolved in tune with seasons and that transforming the United States into the equivalent of the equator would necessarily result in most of the animals, birds, insects, trees, shrubs, plants, even the grass ultimately dying out, only to be replaced with new species moving up from warmer climates. He saw this on the news, heard it in his little community, and dimly understood it might be of some importance, but to him, so long as there was something living in his garden – whatever it might be, wherever it had come from – he could be content. He was not attached to any particular flower or plant, merely that there was a garden where he could sit and there was something in it, and of course it was hot and steamy. In fact, watching one set of wildlife die out to be replaced by another might even be interesting to him, similar to how you can marvel at the destructive force of a fierce thunderstorm or even something simpler, like rain dribbling down a window pane. Nor was he concerned about the inevitable changes to the very landscape. With no winter, hurricane season would last forever, ultimately demolishing most of Florida and the Gulf Coast. Further north, the Arctic sea ice would melt, as would all the tundra in Canada, a cascade of water that would flood most of the Midwest. These things didn’t bother him, or at least beyond a passing sense that he hoped his little garden remained intact, whatever might grow there. The rest was too distant and far removed for him to consider. The only thing, in fact, that he was mildly concerned about was the potential impact on the food supply, but even then his tastes were simple and surely, smarter people than he was would find a way to feed him something. That’s what smarter people were for, after all, to solve the problems he couldn’t, those that he might not even be aware of. Regardless, he found it impossible to believe the grocery store would be empty. There would clearly be some canned meats, salted fish, or something others might find repulsive, but he didn’t mind and even in his strange way, enjoyed.
Otto remained aware enough to understand he was mostly alone in reveling in this everlasting summer. He took what were for him great pains to hide his pleasure from his neighbors and other people in his town he bumped into while out and about. He was aided in this effort by having a reputation for silence, acknowledging others with a wave or nod of his head instead of a few words. To be sure, this tactic got significantly more difficult when everyone seemed to want to talk about this strange development to everyone they met, regardless of whether or not they were strangers. Once, he could get to the grocery store and back without making real eye contact with anyone, but suddenly the entire world seemed to want to accost him with their complaints for some reason, or perhaps simply accost anyone. Every trip to the grocery store these days came with more than one uncomfortable encounter, which generally took a similar form. Otto, can you believe this? I’ve never seen anything like it. You know it’s probably the fault of those damned __________. Only they could come up with something like this, but you know, who is gonna fix it? Do you think these ________ can change the weather? I don’t know about you, but this is getting ridiculous. The price of these _______ and I can’t even get __________. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it much longer, but ________ better do _______ or who knows what will happen. Throughout these exchanges, Otto would put on his best sympathetic stare, which honestly was not all that impressive, a combination of pursed lips and downturned eyes, and simply try to get through it without blurting out that he feels precisely the opposite way. A careful observer might have noted how he rarely looked a person in the eye, or the slight shuffle right and left on the balls of his feet, indicating he would rather be anywhere except there, but in his experience most people were not careful observers, thankfully. They just wanted to share their own pain and could have been speaking to a piece of plywood. Occasionally, someone would look in his basket, eyeing the items he planned to purchase, sometimes grimacing at the sight of sardines or some unidentified meat, and one or two times saying, You eat that stuff? I guess we all will be soon, before letting out a harumph and walking away.
Mostly, Otto tried his best to ignore it, desperate to get back to his garden, even a little disconcerted by the cooler air inside the store thanks to the wretched air-conditioning. There were a few incidents he could not ignore, however, generally involving children, his one weakness when it came to others. Children, it seemed, were something more like him than adults. They had the ability to take things as they came, and most didn’t seem bothered by the heat or the long days given both offered more time to play outside and roam free. This didn’t mean they weren’t bothered at all. Much like Otto, there were moments when they were dramatically affected, an emotion that rose from within to consume their entire being, emanating out from them in extreme behaviors and improbable physical contortions. Otto wasn’t much affected when he saw an adult overcome by a negative emotion, whether sorry or anger, but children were different. There was something about the desperation of their inexpressible rage or, even worse, the innocence of their endless tears that affected him almost as much as a snowstorm. He could hardly bear to look at all, but like a trainwreck, found himself compelled, especially as the behavior grew more and more extreme as children picked up on the stress of their parents. There was one instance in the grocery store, where a young boy, not more than six or seven, stood stone faced at first before a mostly empty shelf of cereal. He couldn’t see all the way up to the top of the rack, but everything directly in front of him was barren, like a vacant lot. There was a smashed up box of something, a few crushed pieces of the cereal serving as litter. Otto doubted he could read the labels, but he appeared to know what should be there, right in front of him, what always had been in front of him, yet now was missing. Not prepared to give up so easily, the young boy shuffled to the right and left, looked up on his tippy toes, searching for something. After a few moments, a lone box far to the right caught his eye, standing upright, something like the monolith from that classic movie Otto never really understood. The boy perked up for a second, then rushed over to it, stood as tall as he could, and picked it up with both hands. There was a short look of hope in his eyes, but quickly, he realized this wasn’t the box he was looking for. It was, instead, some adult cereal without sugar. He looked confused for a moment, then grew enraged, smashing the box on the ground and stomping up and down on it, shattered cereal pieces bleeding out as if it was a dead body.
The boy’s parents stood by for a moment, looking at him with the utmost concern and resignation, unsure what they should do until they sprung into action. The mother rushed forward and tried to take him up in her arms, but the child continued to thrash around in all the frenzy of a fish tossed up on the shore, one that must’ve been possessed by a previously unseen strength. The boy’s arms and legs shot out from his mother’s grip, and his torso wiggled around such that she couldn’t hold him, however tight she tried, even after she went down to her knees, trying to hug him close to her breast simply to stop the shaking. The boy slithered away and left her collapsed on the floor in a demoralized heap, head down, hair ruffled, palms on the sticky boards. The boy immediately swung around, back to the shelf, and looked up at the emptiness in a strange, marvelous wonder, but then all the rage seemed to leak out of him and his shoulders slumped. He let out a whine and a cry, muttering something about his cereal, what could he do without his cereal. The father stepped forward then and put a hand on his shoulder, tentatively, but enough that the boy knew he was there and he wasn’t alone. The mother soon got up and put her arm around the other side consoling him in his tears, and the three remained still and silent for a period. Otto had been watching the episode unfold with the utmost intensity, as if it were some famous play performed by the greatest actors in all the world, but suddenly he felt like he was spying, an intruder, even one of those home invasions he’d heard about. He lowered his eyes and slipped away before anyone else noticed him, racing back home as fast as he could, and then depositing himself in the garden.
Peace, however, was long in coming even in the blessed heat. For some reason, the flowers, well those that continued to flower, seemed especially lazy and lilted, as though they could barely hold themselves up. The hedges that made the space private seemed to fare no better; every leaf was pointed downward, as though they were about to fall off even with the bright green, normally healthy color. This he probably could’ve tolerated. He was in a sense waiting on everything to die anyway, but that afternoon, he had the first inkling that a future of continued heat and humidity might not be as pleasant as it sounded, that the process of everything dying would be much more traumatic than he’d thought, nothing like a smooth dissolve from the old to the new like one might see in a television show. In a corner of the garden, barely in sight from his simple chair, he noticed what seemed to be an odd moving shadow, perhaps the sunlight through some hidden leaves, but on closer inspection, he realized it couldn’t be a shadow, having an oblong, mound-like shape, similar to a small object covered by a blanket. It was flat around the edges, but then rose up a little in the middle. The surface itself was also moving, writhing, and squirming, as if the entire mass was alive. Ants! An army of ants, and they had descended on some poor, exhausted, dead creature. It could have been a mouse, a small rabbit, or a bird, but Otto couldn’t say for sure because it was completely covered by what appeared to be the entire hive, so many they crawled across the thing in layers, thousands upon thousands of them. They streamed towards the dead animal from under the nearby hedge, a phalanx coming, one going, marching as swiftly, effectively, and mercilessly as any military. The one going back to the hill carried with them little bits of flesh, some still red with blood, a couple dripping after them, the messy spoils of war. Otto’s little garden was being invaded, prompting him to leap from his chair in something of a rage. His first instinct was to stamp on them, like one might be confronted by a few trying to sneak up your pant leg. There were far too many, however, and the dead animal buried beneath them made a squishy, crunchy sound, like sticks and goo in a slimy bladder. Further, it was raised a couple of inches off the patio, causing Otto to slip something fierce on this third leap. He tumbled down hard on his elbow, then lay on the ground beside it panting, whining, almost face to face with the unrecognizable creature as the ants started eyeing him, a few even crawling on his outstretched arm and leg.
Fortunately, Otto was not seriously hurt and soon, he was able to lift himself up and flee from the scene as fast as he could. Equally fortunate, Otto was also prone to forget and it wasn’t long before the memory receded into his mind, present as only a sneaking, dark suspicion that perhaps endless summer wasn’t the entirely positive development he previously believed, something like a thin film of rot over an otherwise perfectly clear glass of water, and perhaps his garden might not survive. What would he do without it? Then, as was his way, he realized that some form of the garden would survive, whether it was overrun by ants, filled with dead things, or the flowers were so exhausted they couldn’t lift their faces to the sun, something would be out there. That meant he could still sit in his chair, sweat, and watch, and this thought helped revive his spirits for a time. He continued his routine even as the pickings got slimmer at the store, the people around him became more angry and frustrated, and ever more children were in tears. It seemed the entire world was falling apart, and from the few snatches of news he heard, that appeared to be the case. He was too simple to understand supply chains, or how food that was produced in the United States was exported around the world, and now that there were no more crops, the Southern Hemisphere was starving as well in addition to freezing. These things certainly sounded important in the sense of a child listening to adults and recognizing only a few words, but Otto was able to dismiss them most of the time, so long as he had his garden. The garden itself had seen better days, but even then he managed to find a new appreciation for its hot decay and decline.
By what should have been the following spring, he had drifted back into his contented state, when he made a terrible, tragic mistake. He went to the grocery store on his usual day and the routine had taken on something of the feel of a treasure hunt. The only items still available on any regular basis were old cans, goods that would have been destroyed in better times, but hungry people rarely cared about expiration dates, and Otto himself only had a vague notion of what that meant. In any event, he enjoyed digging through the various cans, inspecting each one, many were dented and the labels ripped off, as if each contained a diamond before placing any in his basket after only the most serious deliberation. He had uncovered quite a few delectables in the proceeding months, oddball products that others had not noticed, and took great care at this process to make sure he did not miss any tasty treats. It was while he had assembled a pile of discarded cans that a neighbor approached the mostly bare shelves. He recognized the man, but did not know his name, nor did the man appear to notice Otto sitting cross legged on the floor at first. Instead, he started fingering the cans, pushing them aside, and muttering under his breath about not having a decent meal in however many months. The man was not visibly angry at first, just tired and frustrated, but his frustration grew, seemingly with each can he pushed away. Otto, being afraid of extreme emotion from adults, did his best to cower on the floor, hoping he wasn’t seen, but as he was attempting to slink away, he accidentally pushed over one of his cans, causing a whole set of them to go rolling across the dirty, greasy floor, drawing the man’s attention.
He looked down on Otto for a moment, confused to find him there as if he’d shown up on his couch in the living room in a puff of smoke, but then noticed the can Otto was clutching to his breast. “Chef-Boyardee! You have Chef-boyardee!” He screamed, both shocked and outraged, pointing down at the can like it were a bar of gold. Otto didn’t know precisely how to reply, he just sat there on the floor looking up at the man looming over him menacingly, convinced this was the strangest creature he’d ever seen. After a moment, it dawned on him that he didn’t really care if he ate Chef-boyardee or old canned peas, but the man certainly did and, for reasons that were not entirely clear, he decided to offer the man his find. He held the can out as reverently as could be, expecting the man to take it, and he tried to offer his best, most sympathetic smile, encouraging him to do so. The man’s rage quickly turned to confusion looking down on Otto as he looked up, and they were locked there in this uncomfortable moment for several long seconds, each unsure what to do, each waiting on something to happen with the vague notion whatever was coming was less than pleasant. There was a passing instant where Otto would’ve sworn the man would smile back and take the gift being offered as a kind gesture, but instead his rage returned, more fiery than before, and he slapped the can out of his hands, sending it tumbling away along with the others, although this time it seemed impossibly loud, like a barrel bouncing off the sidewalk flown from the back of a truck. “I don’t want your charity. I just want a decent fucking dinner.” Otto had no idea what to say, and apparently he smiled back at the man, possibly in some attempt at camaraderie or at least something similar. The man, however, only grew even angrier in response, then confused. “Wait a minute, you’re enjoying this aren’t you! The entire world is ending and you’re enjoying it, smiling at me like that!” The man seemed more amazed than angry now, and started calling to the few other shoppers in the store. “Look at him,” he said. “This son of a bitch is having fun! He’s not suffering like the rest of us. He likes it, the damned fool, look at that idiot grin.” A small crowd began to gather, and they too seemed to think Otto was enjoying himself even though this might’ve been the most uncomfortable moment of his entire life and the only thing he could think to do was run.
Otto ran faster than he ever had, out the store, down the hot street, around the corner, and then another, all the way back to his house. He practically flew through the door, bolting it behind him, and managed to get back into his garden covered in sweat, but the crowd followed along, a little more slowly, yet with more force like a building tidal wave that could only crash upon him. They were clustered outside his little house, ten, fifteen, twenty, he wasn’t sure, except they were angrier than ever. About what Otto wasn’t quite sure either having an impossible time making sense of the events of the past few minutes, but there was no mistaking the tone in their voice and he imagined fire shooting out of their ears like the cartoons he used to watch as a kid. “The freak enjoys it,” they said. “He actually likes this. We’re all suffering, and he’s having a grand old time!” “Well, let’s show him what it means to suffer.” Otto couldn’t see the small crowd and had no idea what they were doing, cowering in his decaying garden, but he could hear motion outside and soon there were actual flames. They were not coming out of their ears, but from the front of his house, flames, smoke, and the unmistakable smell of burning wood. Why was his house on fire? Otto didn’t know, had only the dimmest understanding that the crowd must have set it for reasons that were inscrutable. They were chanting now, smoke him out, smoke him out, he’s the cause of our suffering, it’s his fault, someone has to pay and let it be him by God to save us all. The flames continued to build until his house seemed like a ball of fire and it became obvious even in Otto’s limited mind that the garden would be burned with him in it. At first, he was frightened, like a cornered animal, as he imagined the creature that got devoured by the ants must’ve been, and he nosed around thinking there might be some escape, but the garden was entirely enclosed and the only way out was through the house. Soon, however, he felt the heat from the flames, hotter than anything he’d ever dreamed possible, and it seemed like he must be going home, back to where creation itself began. He turned the chair towards the house, and plopped himself down as the flames licked into the garden and the hedges went up and his very skin burned. You might not believe it, but he was finally happy then, at the end, engulfed in more heat than anyone could take, an endless summer, indeed.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 