Gap-toothed
Venus and Mars are alright in Self-Evident: We Hold These Truths
Gap-toothed
You can imagine where this one is headed. And, no, I’m not going to kill off another Ben, Benj or Benjamin. I am so over that.
Bennie was so intent on texting with his girlfriend as he crossed the street that he didn’t see the bus coming. [This is why texting while walking can be every bit as dangerous as doing so while driving. Make a note of that.]
Doris, of course, was completely unaware of Bennie’s imminent danger. I mean she neither saw nor heard what happened next, text being a silent, pixelated form of intercourse. As far as I know, Bennie never told her about the incident either.
I see a hand up. “Where does she work?”
Okay, we can jump ahead if that flips your bippy, but what I wanted to tell you involves Bennie. Doris is a grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which position includes some paid work—enough to pay her half of the rent and food. She’s part of the team that just this week, as I write, announced the discovery of phosphene gas in the atmosphere of Venus.
Whoa, Nellie!
The only known natural sources of phosphene gas around the home place are microbes. Here we’ve been scrambling to find evidence of former or subterranean life on Mars while pooh-poohing the Venusian possibilities, and it appears we may have been looking in the wrong direction! Barking up the wrong planet, so to speak.
Doris was explaining all this to us the other evening. She knows a whole lot more about planetary history than we do,1 and it was pretty fascinating.
It seems all three planets had water early on, and there are some cosmologists who believe it arrived as ice.2 That’s considered pretty speculative at this point, but it’s hard to imagine how water could’ve survived the intense heat when the planets were first formed. “So it had to come from somewhere,” she explained.
Makes sense to me.
Anyway, we lucked out. “Venus experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, so the surface is now impossibly hot for life as we understand it to survive.” She paused to take a bite of pizza.
Bob piped up, “I thought the whole thing was too hot.”
Doris swallowed and sipped her tea.3 “That was the general view, but we’ve discovered the upper atmosphere is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Plenty cool. My advisor has a theory that life may have evolved there before things heated up but only survived as microbes in the clouds after it cooked.”
Hand up again. “Who is Bob?”
A friend. Okay?
“Where does he work?”
What’s this with jobs, jobs, jobs? I don’t get it.
Okay, geez. Bob Haversham is Doris’ brother. He works in sales. Some sort of software I think. Seems to like it, or at least I’ve never heard him complain. Which is something.
“But Mars is different ...” Gwen interjected. “Dry and dusty.” [Oh, and before you ask, Gwen is a nurse at Mass General.]
“Right. Two probs there,” Doris bit into the pizza again.
“RN?”
Yes. She’s been there about four years now. Longtime friend of Doris. They get together almost weekly. Dates Bob now and again.
“First, Mars never formed a magnetic field like Earth, so there’s no equivalent of the Van Allen belts that protect us from radiation.”
Ellen spoke up, “That’s going to be a big problem for us if we ever land there.” She picked up a slice. “This moon pie is great. I love feta and mozzarella on a pizza.”
“Sure thing. Then too, Mars is smaller. Less powerful gravity. So a lot of whatever water and atmosphere were there have escaped.”
“It’s okay. I’m more into tomato sauce.” [Bennie, I think. Though it could have been James. They’re both at the far end of the table and whoever said it had his mouth full. Don’t they teach people manners anymore?]
“So if there was ever life on Mars, it could possibly be a fossil record. Or, who knows? Maybe still there, underground. NASA’s sent a lander to a former lake bed. Maybe … who knows?”
“But there’s enough atmosphere left that NASA is sending a helicopter, right?” [Bob.]
“Yep.” [Bennie.]
Ellen again, “Venusian microbes in the clouds seems pretty ironic.” [Okay, okay; she works in the MIT book store. Lit major.]
“How’s that?” [Gwen.]
What? Bennie’s job?
But I was going to tell you about the irony Ellen suggested, which is deeply ironic indeed. Deeply.
Okay, whatever. Bennie does evictions. I know that sounds nasty, but someone has to do it. From storage units. As when people stop paying for them. The stuff all has to go somewhere. It can’t go nowhere. And someone, not no one, has to do that. He’s a somewhere man, not the opposite.
And here’s the thing—or “a thing,anyway:” Pretty much every thing and everything in storage units is a thing someone doesn’t want. At least, clearly, some thing or something someone doesn’t want “now.” [Ahora mismo.4] Maybe it’s a thing once wanted, or a thing Mom once wanted, or a thing one might want in some indefinite future, but it is beyond question a thing one doesn’t want in the moment.
Further, most who rent a storage unit have ample disposable income, else they wouldn’t have an excess of things to stow in the first place, except for those who rent a storage unit in which to live, which is another set entirely. However, both those with ample income and those who rent to dwell have a reasonably strong incentive to pay the monthly fee.
It is those in the murky middle who quit payment.
Okay, they may have fallen on harder times in some way, but the “thing” is, if the stuff they stuffed into the bin was actually important to them: #1. They wouldn’t have put it in a storage unit in the first place; and #2. They wouldn’t have quit coughing up the dough.
Am I right? Of course I’m right.
Actually, when we get right down to it, as Bennie likes to say: “What people stash in the SaveRight® system is indecision.”
Isn’t that the truth?
“Y’know there’s all these AI techies at MIT who think it’s only a matter of time until we can abandon our bodies?” [Ellen again.] “Upload our minds to the cloud?”
Doris sighed. [Sigh.] “Yeah. Whole lot of fun that would be. Touchless sex or sexless touch.”
“They may have already done that on Venus. But it seems they got small.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to communicate with them?”
“Should we get another pitcher of beer?”
“But what does he do with the stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“Huh?”
“Software. For PCs or Macs?”
“Remember that time we were over at Gloria’s?”
“So, we’re pushing NASA for a fly-by instead of a lander.”
“Sure.”
“No, the stuff in the storage ...”
“Oh. That. He takes it out.”
“When we were joking about Tom ...”
“How he gets so tongue-tied ...”
“Just out to the street, usually. It goes away on its own.”
“Like the Martian atmosphere ...”
“Talk about indecision. If we upload ourselves ...”
“Here’s that pitcher.”
“What’s Gloria doing now?”
“And we live forever.”
“I think she switched jobs.”
“I think he sells some of the good stuff. It’s in the contracts.”
“How will we ever decide?”
*****
Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [139] Presumably more than you as well, if that isn’t being too presumptuous.
2 [140] The cosmic ice “man” cameth?
3 [141] Iced, unsweetened as is her wont. No beer for her: She has to study later.
4 [142] I believe this to be the third instance of a Spanish term in this volume. Correct me if I’m wrong. It means “right now.” Classy, eh?
Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
Want more stories? Check out my website!
