David Fadem
Black strands of pavement stretch out like carved canals, dark and reflective in the early evening. The headlights seem more audible than visual, resonant klaxons humming a warning as they pass, stretching out in the murky night. He loves the way cars look in the rain; he loves when they’re in park and you can see the soft yellow light illuminate the passengers, radiance greeting them after their journey through the storm is done. It’s the same feeling as when you see a house with the lights on and the TV playing during a snowstorm, and you feel nothing but joy for that person and their TV and their warm house. Not a hint of envy, and then you feel good about yourself for not being envious.
The slice of pizza he holds is uncannily good. His friends and family seem to feel neutral about the pizzeria he sits in, but their ambivalence gives the experience an exclusivity – he’s a regular, he has that strange relationship with the staff that regulars have. What do you say to them? You know their faces but not their names, you eternally pay them money, and they eternally offer their service. Is that all there is now? Forgetting to pack your lunch for the evening and inevitably having the same excellent, crackly, perfectly sauced slice of pizza? The night will return, you will greet the cooks with the same resting level of recognition, you will return to work. He feels uncomfortable in his American repetition. It isn’t monotony as much as it’s a sequence – a comfortable, reliable cycle of eating and digestion that carries so much privilege in its bloated rhythm. In the rain, he can’t tell apart the different toxic liquids dripping from the cars. This disquiets him.His shift starts up again in 15 minutes. His job is fun – he feels bad about how fun his job is. Other people his age toil in the desolate frozen halls of supermarkets or the thick greasy air that wafts from fast food kitchens, but he gets to sit down in a comfortable chair and do interesting work, and he gets paid more than them. He can buy his pizza. He can pay for his gas – gas, the nebulous unseen fuel coursing through the maze-like pathways around the engine, rumbling under his feat, primordial dinosaur carcasses used and disposed of. Why is driving so fun? Why does gliding along an empty highway, the soft pavement like snow, give way to the utter sublime? His mom has always wanted to drive on Highway 1 – brilliant chocolatey stone and the dry desert grasses, the Pacific stretching out with its infinite might, so polluted it is almost visible. He had a dream he was driving on that consoling route. In his waking life, he would’ve been listening to Jim Croce or Boygenius, he would’ve crafted the perfect sequence of songs to guide him across the expanse, the rhythm and the road working together in an exclusively American harmony. How beautiful this great country, how high its ridges, E Pluribus Unum, Leaves of Grass, Fleetwood Mac, deep fried Oreos, Martin Luther King, God. In the distance, a great figure looms in the sea – Cthulhu, some great whale? In the dream, he just keeps driving, over the barrier (his greatest fear in this situation), but the car glides like it does on 78, flying with a greyscale stream of pollution trailing behind it. The Cthulhu lump in the ocean gets closer; it’s now clear that it consists entirely of trash. Milk cartons and microplastics, those horrible plastic can-holder things that get stuck on birds’ necks. Plastic bags, pizza boxes. Before the trash swallows you and your fossil-fueled Saab, the dream ends and you wake up staring at the pools of grease that have gathered on your slice.
He goes back to his job and does his work. It is incredible to enjoy what makes you money, and to clock out with a feeling of fullness. Once again, this is not some monotonous drudgery — it’s a privilege.
David Fadem is a senior at the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts and an incoming freshman at Middlebury College.
This piece was written for my contemporary literature class, an initial free-written response to a prompt regarding what would be the most important literary themes of 2024. I believe that the climate crisis and our complacency in global warming is an increasingly vital topic, so I decided to represent it through a narrative about earning and spending money. Providing for oneself in America often means contributing to pollution, and sometimes the cycle feels unbreakable — but it also is difficult to imagine parting with. “In addition, here’s a link to a playlist that resembles the tone set in the story.”
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