Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

Seven days where nobody works. Nothing is open. There are no arrests, although crime occurs, it does, I’ve had friends murdered. I’ve lost worldly possessions. But you’re not going to be arrested, not during Saturnalia.

We’ll be called out to deal with carpets and mattresses. We’ve stocked up on pepsin powder for those, and we’ll charge for travel. It’s a good business, stain removal. Especially after Saturnalia. I hate having to go into people’s homes, though. Other homes are dirty and they reek and I don’t feel safe there. You never know what people will do, what they consider normal, in their own homes. I’ve had clients stand naked watching me. I’ve had food offered that I wouldn’t feed a dog or a goat. I always need a shower after being in a stranger’s home.

Though people are mostly dull these days. They care less than they used to. They’re tired and old. I know I feel older.

We’ve stocked up on sodium percarbonate. That’s good for chocolate stains and there will be plenty of those. People think they are original, as if they’re the only ones to cover themselves in the stuff. I say, “Seen it before. Seen it plenty.”

I’m lining up my stocks, counting the bottles, when my son says, “I’m not staying home this year.” He’s 21 and perhaps I can’t keep him safe anymore. “This year, I’m going to be a part of it. I’ll help you with the clothes when I get back.”

“You should stay at home.” I try not to cry. I don’t want to make him feel guilty. That is never a good reason to do anything. “We can watch it on TV.”

“I want to be the one on TV. Can’t I be happy, for a little while?”

“Don’t go,” I say. “I’ll make you a steak dinner tonight. And tomorrow night a chicken dinner. I’ll cook you your favourite food every night for a month.” He nods, and he eats two steak dinners, but when I check his room at midnight he is gone.

He’s slow, though, and loud, so I hear him stumbling to the front door, kicking the umbrella stand as he does every single time, and knocking the Saturn Tree we keep high, under a light, as he does every time as well.

What can I do? Tie him down? Join him to commit our own saturnalian acts, in our own home?

Maybe it is time to let him free.

He fumbles with the door locks, as he always does, forgetting which turns which way, and how many turns, and whether or not he’s already turned one or the other. He looks almost like a shadow in the dark, not a real person at all.

I don’t say, “This is why you have to stay home,” because it’s my fault he’s that way.

I’m the one who did it to him.

It’s been 23 years since the return of the Tarvos . Can you call it a return, if the ship never made it back whole? I was only four when it set out amidst a wild fanfare, because they like to make a fuss, don’t they? The rocket scientists. As if they are the ones who’ll save us all. They’re still like it, years on. Discovering new planets. “Earth-like’”ones, and you find out it’s all bullshit. You know? What they mean is Earth ten million years ago when the only things here were crawly little worms or something.

Speaking of which, there will be dirt to get out. Some of them get buried, up their necks. They showed it on the TV last year. Being used as a toilet, one of them. If those clothes had come in, I would have burnt them and paid the difference.

I was nine by the time the Tarvos reached Saturn. Those pictures of the swirling north pole made me dizzy, that’s mostly what I remember.

Most people were more interested in watching it suck in samples of the icy particles orbiting the planet.

We’ve stocked up on bottles of filtered water. The drycleaners’ greatest trick is that air and water are the best cleaners, at the end of the day. We can charge what we like, but our basics costs can be minimal.

I was 14 when the Tarvos returned; I remember that clearly. All the adults so excited by the return of the thing, the rest of us not caring all that much. Happy that they were distracted so they’d leave us alone, and we could party. Skip school without anyone noticing.

But we were all out there, watching the sky for a glimpse, when it blew up.

They calculated wrong, or something. Didn’t think the ice would be as heavy as it was. It’s all about the micro millimetres, isn’t it? And they get it wrong.

We’ve stocked up on methylated spirits, and we’ve got plenty of clean absorbent paper. Candle wax stains are always a problem. People get carried away, and there’s spillage. There are fires, too, but that’s not up to us. Other people manage that. Or don’t.

They love the fireworks, don’t they? And the fires, they don’t care about safety or property. They’ll set things on fire purposely, to see them burn. In the shade of the Saturn Trees, all of it seems to make sense. Is it because of the Tarvos ? How it burned on entry, exploded in the night sky like fireworks?

Six crew onboard (and the ones with children mattered more, according to the media), all of them now with streets named after them. Suburbs.

It felt like rain but the drops were solid and stayed heavy on your skin if you left it. I wiped all the drops off but some clung to my hair, and my ears, and in my eyebrows.

People dragged their children inside, because there were parts raining down as well. There were deaths, though not in our neighbourhood. I heard one girl my age was pierced through the heart by a shard of metal.

Workers in Bangkok offices, Singapore noodle houses, sheep farms. Miners dredging gold and oil and zinc. All of them went out and stood in it. Most of them felt it.

The ice particles, melted. The pieces of ship. The other pieces. Those poor astronauts.

The astrologers told us they predicted it. That this was bound to happen, it was fate. Saturn was in the eighth house and that meant horrible death.

“For who?” people like my dad asked. “What, all of us?”

“Prepare for the grave,” the astrologers said.

Wasn’t long before many of us wished we’d been one of those early ones. Knocked down flat by debris. Gone in a flash.

We all feel the melancholy. The taller the trees grow, the more the melancholy sinks into us.

We’re all whirled up into Saturn’s dark heart now.

The ice, the ship, the others. All of this rained upon us.

The ancient alchemists, were partly right; for them, Saturn designated lead. They believed the planet was made of lead. And these water droplets, when they were tested?

Traces of lead. Surprised them all, the so-called smart ones. They hadn’t thought that.

Once the particles touched ground, they crystallised. It was beautiful to watch; we all thought so. Especially once they started to grow.

In the forests. In backyards. In bowls set as centrepieces. On roofs and walls, on the heads of statues, in footpath-cracks and sewers.

So many crystal trees.

Each of them growing up, up, towards Saturn.

My father worried that the magnetism would shift the earth off its axis, but he didn’t finish school. I told him lead isn’t magnetic.

It looks like silver, he said. He was one of many who broke pieces off, grew more trees.

Share the wealth, he said. The beautiful crystals shouldn’t only be for the rich, he said, and they weren’t.

The richest people in the world used to be the ones who owned the land that provided the metal. People like me didn’t get a look in. But now we all have own trees; they grow anywhere.

Air quality testing showed that the Saturn Trees were not only beautiful, but healthful; they attracted lead particles, literally sucking lead out of the atmosphere.

Places whose high lead content led to birth defects and early death grew more and more of them. We all did. All you needed was a small piece. Every home soon filled with the air-purifying trees. Every school. Every hospital.