Ben checked the weather for Chicago. Hit refresh. Checked it in a different zip code to ascertain the precise predictions for snow in Oak Park, Aurora, Waukeegan, and others of the outlying suburbs. He checked ski conditions for Alta in Utah and Bear Valley in California, astounded at the predicted totals of snowfall for the coming 24 hours.
All around the country, the snow fell in blankets. Everywhere except in Chicago, where the wind howled and the temperature held steadily in the “Too Balls-Ass Cold to Snow” range.
But Ben sat at his desk in his boxer shorts and a Santa hat, the thermostat to his apartment set at a comfortable eighty-five degrees. He had put a Christmas mix on the stereo and the music wandered into his room.
He checked his Facebook profile and clicked through a few photo albums of friends from elementary school. Already married. Was this possible? His mother said that she had run into Babbette Nichols, selling shoes in the mall last month. She was studying at night for a pharmacy degree. Ben had sighed audibly on the phone and told his mother that he had to go do some reading.
After checking the long-range forecast for Maui, he searched “Haleakala” on Wikipedia and read about dormant volcanoes and poured himself a glass of bourbon, wondering if it might be possible to write about anything that didn’t in some way involve natural disasters. He drank the glass of bourbon and clicked through some articles about sulfur particles and global cooling. Some wingnut in Kansas had an idea to pump sulfur into the atmosphere with a hose lifted by giant helium balloons.
Before he knew it, the bourbon was gone. He poured himself another and sat back in his chair. Stared at the screen for a second and then threw the glass back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Silence across the apartment except for the faint noise of music coming from the living room and the clanking of the radiators along the walls.
Walls that seemed to close in. Everyone had left town already, and the weight of the apartment’s thick heated air seemed to press everywhere. From somewhere came the sound of dogs barking to the tune of Jingle Bells.
In a sudden sweeping move he stood up and went to the closet. He put on long underwear and a pair of wool pants. He took off the Santa hat and put on a clean undershirt, a red flannel, and a thick wool sweater. The bourbon was beginning to hit him, and he smiled. Walking over to his dresser, he pulled out a pair of wool socks and dug around for his big winter hat. He was already beginning to sweat. The layers were piling up, but the wind was howling and he knew that he would need every scrap of fabric on his shoulders. He wrapped his face in a scarf and found his pair of mittens stuck in the couch cushions.
The cold pierced through the long underwear instantly. Warmed by the bourbon, his upper body stayed pretty warm. Ice crystals danced in the otherwise dry air. He smelled the bourbon on his scarf and his eyes teared up immediately. In the silent darkness of the street, everything looked blurry. The streetlamps had halos around them and the frozen puddles appeared rimmed with white dust—flurries or chopped up ice leftover from the previous storm.
The muffled sound of the wind through his hat. The sharp tingle of the wind on his exposed cheeks. Ben walked down the block and turned left toward the lake. Few people were about and he walked down 55th Street, crossing Stony Island and South Hyde Park Boulevard. A few cars whizzed by on Lake Shore Drive, as if shivering forward in the cold.
He walked beneath Lake Shore Drive to the 55th Street Beach. And there the lake sprawled in front of him. The wind whirled and slammed into the shore, braced by growing spidery patches of ice that reached into the black expanse. In the clear night sky, across the expanse, he could see smoke rising from the lighted stacks in Gary, Indiana.
How ridiculous he must look, Ben thought to himself. A black mound sitting on the hardened sand of a winter lake beach, staring at Indiana in the dark. He had been sitting in his underwear, not twenty minutes before, listening to dogs barking Christmas carols and drinking bourbon. He had been searching social networks and reading about, of all things, dormant volcanoes.
And now, of his own accord, he sat in frigid wind chills of the icy lake, staring into absence.
What am I supposed to think about, he thought to himself. Thinking about what he should think about seemed an inadequate thing to think about. So he thought instead about what it would look like if a volcano was exploding out there over the shores of Gary (which, incidentally, he thought sounded vaguely mythic: the Shores of Gary—like an Irish rune).
“The Shores of Gary,” he brogued to himself. “The Shores of Gary.” Something satisfyingly mysterious about the industry of the place.
His ass started to get cold, so Ben stood up. He walked up the path to Promontory Point. The skyline glowed in front of him, the colors reflecting off the lake, brightening the sky in the distance. He stood, looking at the skyline. Alone and with his hands in his pockets. There, across the silent miles to the Loop, a million people shuffled around in the streets and on the higher-up floors of blackened steel skyscrapers. Waiting for the El and looking up articles about volcanoes. Drinking bourbon and sitting in their underwear, making preparations in their own ways for the holidays.
He stared a moment before ducking under Lake Shore Drive toward a warm bar that he knew on 53rd Street. He would have another drink before trekking carefully over the ice, toward home.
