The New Speed of Normal
Benjamin Gorman
Kate doesn’t particularly like her job, but then she doesn’t have anything to compare it to, since it’s her first one. The solar panels collect more than just sun. Unless they’re cleaned regularly, they develop a film of dust and pollen. Someone has to scrub them off. Kate’s on the tall side, a basketball player at Central High, not a natural center but always a power forward, even though she hopes to be a wing or even a tall point guard in college. And Kate likes being outdoors when the weather is tolerable, so, when it’s not basketball season, and when it’s not too hot for humans to be outdoors in the summer, she earns some spending money and a little savings for college by working for Locke Contracting. The woman who owns the company took one look at Kate’s long arms and hired her on the spot, ignoring Kate’s permanent sneer and lack of enthusiasm about the job she was applying for.
The company sends her out with a partner, and the two of them go to the assigned houses and scrub. That’s the gig.
And today isn’t even hot. Sometimes it will get up to 130 in August, and no one is allowed to be outdoors. Those blazing days can even pop up when no one is expecting it, sometimes in mid-spring or late fall, once in early February. That’s why they always go out in pairs, just in case the temperature swings wildly, one of those heat wave days or a surprise blizzard, and someone passes out or gets caught in the snow. Today isn’t too bad: High 80s. Kate has worked in a lot worse.
But she’s in a foul mood today. She’s not even quite sure why. Sure, some of it is normal stuff. She slept through her alarm (again), and her mom yelled down the stairs to wake her up in a ragged screech that was not the first thing she wanted to hear. And she has cramps, and the painkillers wore off two hours ago. And she’s hungry, but their lunch break isn’t for another hour. Normal stuff. But there’s something else that’s bothering her, and that something else is named George.
She hates when they pair her with George. Most of the company’s workers are high school students like Kate or students from Western Oregon University, but George is old. Kate doesn’t know how old, but even older than her parents, old enough that they don’t have anything in common to talk about. Worse, he doesn’t listen to music and seems not to understand that his coworkers always have their earbuds in, so he just starts talking and makes everybody pause, and then they figure out he doesn’t really have anything in particular to say, but by then they’ve been totally interrupted. Some of Kate’s coworkers have figured out they can mostly nod in George’s direction, and he’ll presume they’ve heard him, but Kate knows she’s probably too polite to ever acquire that skilled disinterest.
And that isn’t even the worst thing about George. The worst thing is: He’s slow. Most days Kate and someone near her age can get twenty houses done in a shift. With George, she knows she’ll be lucky to finish fifteen today. Everything he does is slow. The way he dips the mop in the bucket is slow. The way he carries the bucket is slow. Somehow, when he’s filling the bucket, the water seems to leave the house’s spout more slowly. And the way he walks is so…
He’s saying something to her, but she can’t hear it over her music. She rolls her eyes, sets down her mop, pulls her gloves off, taps her headphone to pause, and says, “What?” It might be a little more snappish than she intends, but even as Kate begins to feel guilty, she wonders if he’ll take the hint.
“Careful,” George repeats.
He is pointing at her foot.
Kate looks down. Sure enough, she’s stepped on the tomato plant in the box under this solar panel. One of the branches is mostly broken off and probably doomed, and the green tomatoes hanging from it won’t ever ripen.
“Damn.” Kate looks up at George. “Sorry.”
He shrugs. “Not my tomatoes.” He hooks a thumb toward the house. “But they may complain to the bosses.”
She nods and reaches up to tap her headphones back into life, and the sound of her music interrupts whatever he’d started to say next. She taps them off again. “What?” This time she doesn’t snap, but she wishes she’d chosen a different word because she recognizes she was in the wrong for interrupting him for a change.
George smiles at a joke Kate has missed. “I was just saying you do know we are paid by the hour, right?”
“Yeah.” Kate doesn’t understand.
“So, if we do twenty houses in eight hours, how many hours will you be paid for?”
“Eight,” she says.
“And if we do ten houses in eight hours, how many hours will you be paid for?”
“Eight.”
George raises his eyebrows and waits.
“What?” Kate says again, but this time it’s not mean or apologetic; it’s an embarrassed “what?” because she still isn’t getting it.
“I’m just saying, you try to go so fast that you’re always sloshing water out of the bucket or stepping on somebody’s tomatoes or carrots or whatever. And I understand some people like to go faster. If that’s your way, it’s your way.” He shrugs and pauses longer than is comfortable. “But you know you don’t have to. You don’t get paid any more if you go faster. The people who hired Locke to get their panels scrubbed don’t care if it gets done in twenty minutes or an hour. In fact, they might like it better if we took our time. They’ll certainly like it better if we don’t kill their tomatoes.”
Kate frowns and considers this as she taps her earbuds and starts yanking her gloves back on to get back to work, and then she catches herself as she grabs the handle of her mop at her usual pace. She realizes she is rushing without even thinking. She stops, drops the mop back into the bucket, pulls off her gloves, and tucks them under an arm.
She looks up at the house in front of her. It’s a normal house, most of it underground, the portion above sloped to one side to maximize sun exposure, with rows of solar panels stacked on top of one another, garden beds in front of each one. Most families can’t grow all they need to eat, but they can make a big dent in it. People enjoy their house gardens, but it’s common knowledge and a source of shared humor that people have different feelings about gardening based on their generations. People Kate’s age talk about the mental health benefits and the aesthetics; they are competitive about how much they can grow and also how beautiful their gardens make their houses look. People her parents’ ages focus on their gardening as a civic duty and are often judgemental of people who don’t work hard on their upkeep. And people a little older, maybe George’s age, think of their gardens as insurance against starvation. Not that anyone is starving anymore. Kate admits she can’t fully empathize with old folx’ anxieties about food. She’s honestly relieved Goerge isn’t giving her too hard a time about the broken tomato branch. Maybe, she thinks, he’s cooler than she’d thought.
She taps off her headphones. “Hey,” she says to George, “can I ask you a question?”
George keeps mopping the panel in slow circles. “Sure.”
“Do you like this job?”
He stops for a second, then goes back to mopping. “Yeah, I guess I really do. It’s a fine job.”
“Really?” Kate says, her skepticism warring with her surprise.
He nods. “Seriously. There’s not much to it, and that’s a relief.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re a bit young to remember this, but it didn’t always seem like we’d get to have nice cushy jobs like this anymore.”
“When was that?”
“How far do you get in your history classes? Like, how close to the present?”
“Basically up through the end of last century. Like the Vietnam War and then 9/11.”
“Seriously? That was more than fifty years ago! That’s all before my time. Are they saying everything in my lifetime counts as ‘Current Events’?”
Kate smiles and shakes her head. “No, I think they’re afraid anything from the last fifty years is too political. They don’t want to get in trouble.”
George nods, looks down into the flowerbed, then up into the sky, and just when Kate isn’t sure he’s going to respond, he finally says, “I’ll bet that’s part of it, sure, but there’s more to it than that. They’re scared, but also traumatized.” He exhales a quick, sad laugh through his nose. “‘Scared’ and ‘scarred.’ Big difference for just one letter.”
“What are they too scarred to tell us about?
George plunks his mop into his bucket, bobs it up and down over the water to lose some of the extra, and then places the head carefully on the panel in front of him. He takes such a long pause, Kate wonders where his mind has gone, but this time she expects he’ll come back.
“Know how we just take the weather for granted?” he says. “Like, we all just understand that sometimes we won’t be able to go outside because it’s too hot, or a blizzard will hit whenever? Well, when I was a kid-” He gives her a respectful nod. “Not a teenager like you. I mean a little kid.”
Kate appreciates the attempt to avoid condescension, even if it’s a failed, awkward one.
“When I was little, we took the weather for granted, too. Summers, we knew, would be hot. Like maybe up to a hundred degrees.”
They both laugh at the absurdity of that.
“And in winters we might get a little snow and a day off or two. It was predictable enough that even a light snow was a big deal. People would talk about it. Seriously. And then everything got broken. And I mean everything. When tens of thousands of people died in heatwaves in places like India and Malaysia and Central America, we shook our heads and said it was sad,and didn’t really change our day-to-day lives much. Believe it or not, there were still people denying it was even happening.
“But then those heatwaves hit the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, and Taiwan all at the same time. Big deal, right? All far away from Oregon.” He flapped a hand towards the distance. “We didn’t understand the consequences, either. Here’s the thing: Nothing could be done in any of those places. No work. No shipping. Everyone who had AC hid inside, trying to stay alive. And it turns out everything depends on those spots. All the microchips were made on one island. All the oil went through those canals. Everything, worldwide, just locked up, then broke down.
“It wasn’t the apocalyptic wars we worried about over water or oil. It was just nothing all of a sudden. The whole global economy froze. People starved. These panels here…” George swirls the mop in an unusually fast motion to point at them. “...they couldn’t move from the factories to these houses. So, blackouts all over. And no panels means no AC. And no AC means people died in other places. And the houses were a lot different then, too. Not built to catch sun or withstand extreme weather.” He catches himself. “Weather. Normal weather. What we used to call ‘extreme weather.’
He looks out between the angled houses covered in shiny panels and lush vegetable gardens, to the street beyond, its two black lines of charging strips waiting to juice the cars as they drive by in either direction. But there are no cars now, and he can hear the sound of his memories.
“Mostly, when people die of starvation, they do it in their homes. But when the old fashioned houses got too hot, hotter than the outside, those people stumbled out and sometimes died in the streets.”
Kate nods. “I know it got bad. I mean, I can’t fully imagine what it felt like to see … all that. Bodies and stuff. But I know it was bad. But…”
She finds herself capable of a George-like pause.
“What?”
“But what does that have to do with this job?”
George smiles and nods. “Fair question. See, this job is not exciting. It’s not fourth-quarter clutch time and your team is down by two points and you have the ball outside the arc and it’s all on you. It’s the first quarter, and your team is already up by eight, and you’ve got to get back on defense, but it feels like a marathon and not a sprint. And I’ll bet, to you, that feels more boring, right?”
Kate smiles. “Yep.”
“And you’re right,” George says. “It is more boring. But here’s the thing. Clutch time seems cool because you might win. It’s that chance of winning that makes it exciting. But being up by eight in the middle of the first quarter feels a lot better to me because humanity lost. We lost big. And we almost lost it all.
“So trust me, Kate; Boring is better.”
Kate nods, quickly at first, then more slowly as she dunks her mop into the bucket. The water sinks into the tendrils of the simple cotton mop, turning them from light gray to dark gray. Not much, but a visible change. She raises the mop to the panels above her, slaps it down gently, and begins to circle… at George’s pace.