OTTERS SAVED FROM DEATH

I don’t want to flatten out the song by writing down the lyrics here.

Lisbeth’s son pulled up to the curb, unannounced, to find both garage doors open. The snow blower, too heavy for her to push, was in the driveway, as was his fathers old electric wheelchair. Two-thirds of the three car garage were devoted to file boxes, plastic shelves loaded with Wal-Mart hauls of paper towels, cleaning supplies, and 2-liter bottles of soda; in addition were folding walkers with cut tennis balls for feet; a ramp into the house that she had built for his father, but that his father had never left the hospital to see; a library cart dense with books; blue trash bins. His mother stood at the center, picking up objects from the top and replacing the carefully to keep the entire pile from shifting.

He said hello for a second time.

“What are you doing,” he asked, stepping onto the ramp that led into the house. He drove up to watch the Green Bay game. He didn’t have reception himself, and didn’t want to sit at a bar alone, drinking beers and trying not to get drunk.

“Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just tired of being alone.”

He stood on the ramp, unsure of what to say to that. Eventually he went in and turned on the game. The dogs, Millie and Winnie, were excited to see him and he scratched their heads on the way to the television. The game started in the Green Bay cold, but the field was green and the flurries that could barely be drifting across the camera lens were supposed to pass. Ten minutes game time later, though, the field was white, with shuffling footprints where players grappled at the line. He had asked his mother, “Don’t you want to watch the game?” She had replied that she didn’t know, she would go upstairs and read. The snow fell in clumps, obscuring yard markers and swallowing movement. He even failed to notice his mother, who sat down in the big chair, until she talked to him about neighbors he didn’t know and the latest signs of senility in her mother. The book was in her lap.

Variable hope chamber: as soon as he originated the phrase, he thought it was perfect. Perfect because it would never make sense to any but the four of them, the four in the car traveling to Flagstaff for a night before heading home. He imagined saying the phrase in front of their friend Jason, who had waffled about coming on the trip. Jason was subsequently ousted by Peter, who had not only not waffled, but who had agreed to come before knowing any details about the trip, including the fact of the first day’s fourteen hour drive. How would anyone explain the Biosphere to Jason, or to anyone?

The tour had started in the triangular greenhouse structure, with its tropical forest, its savannah, its desert. Here, only the ocean impressed, 25-feet deep, in algae bloom, its own coral reef visible down its center like a fossilized spine. The path twisting through foliage and the warmth of trapped sunlight were too familiar from similar offerings at botanic gardens, but the ocean, with its slow ripple, impressed. Then they descended into the basement, all concrete and standing puddles, where square machines regulated the temperatures and maybe the humidity of the climates above. He had been in few spaces more utilitarian, less adorned, than the basement. When the tour started again, the group was led to an underground tunnel that, the tour guide announced into his microphone, led to a separate structure nicknamed the lung. They went through a concrete tunnel, then stepped through a ship’s lock. After this doorway, the tunnel was no longer constructed with the rigidity of concrete block, but was a rounded, downward-sloping passageway painted with beige enamel. Another ship’s lock led into the lung itself. The lung was a domed structure that solved the engineering problem of where to displace air as it heated up and cooled down in the hermetically-sealed biosphere. The geodesic dome had, attached at its center, a sixteen-ton metal plate, the hermetic seal kept intact and movement made possible with a black rubber diaphragm. In the shimmering heat of a desert summer, the increase in pressure raised the plate and filled the diaphragm; when it cooled off at night, the disk would lower, the lung exhaling.

“Okay, are you the last ones?” the tour guide asked. “Okay, good. Folks - this rather strange room we’re in - I told you it got the nickname of the lung - what the engineers called it, the variable air chamber.”