He sweeps the flakes gently with his gloved hands from the car windows, trying not to damage them. They fall, tumbling and twinkling. He’s never learned to like the light from sodium lamps, partly because their color rendering index sucks, but maybe more because the powdery orange color reminds him of Bayer Children’s Chewable Aspirin, whose taste he hated when his mother made him take it. He can still visualize with a pang the teal-white glow of the mercury vapor street lamp that stood across the street from his house when he was growing up. It looked so lunar and lovely and lonely in the rain at night. His town started changing over to sodium when he was in high school, and since he couldn’t believe anyone would do it for aesthetic reasons, he went to the library to research the motive. Subsequently he went around saying to his classmates, intending it as a parody of a fatuous conversation opener, “Say, did you know that sodium lamps give off 12 percent more light than mercury lamps for half the energy cost?” He thought it was funny. God help him, he even did it at school dances. No wonder the girls ran from him.
He liked that scene in the movie about the parking lot, but his beef with popular culture is that it’s always religious or spiritual people who say things like that, things about transcendence. Whereas in his experience, scientists are more likely than anyone else to feel wonder in the contemplation of mundane phenomena.
He heads downhill into town. The city hasn’t salted the street yet, so he creeps along at fifteen miles per hour. Three years ago a truck lost control on this very hill and smashed into the porch of the church at the bottom of the slope. The nose of the truck knocked out both pillars holding up the gable, substituting as support its own cab roof, and the fit was so perfect, the porch superstructure didn’t tilt an inch. Mark found himself hoping they’d leave the truck where it was, as a bold new design element. It would be no quirkier than one or two of the newest buildings on campus.
He drives west across town. He’s lived here for almost thirty years. Since the downtown streets form a rectilinear grid, there are dozens of alternate routes of identical length to many destinations, and he’s staved off the boredom attendant on trivial errands by clocking different options. Thus he’s ended up knowing, without even trying, the timing of all the downtown traffic lights. It has given him insight into how traffic planners work. For example, the north-south street that runs directly from the high school and just misses the bolus of the pedestrian zone to connect with the east-west state route at the south end of town becomes predictably congested every day at 4:30 p.m., when the late-schedule school buses and the early commuting traffic coincide. As the problem worsened over several years, growing numbers of drivers, like Mark, shifted west one block. This alternate street was more residential, and had fewer traffic lights than the streets on either side of it. Suddenly, one of its lights was shifted from a 30-second red to a 75-second red. The street residents had probably complained to the city about the increased traffic, and the engineers had responded. With the longer red, the heavier flow on the street abated. But Mark waited, figuring that even the residents didn’t want a 75-second red at the end of their block. Sure enough, after three months, the light was reprogrammed to 45 seconds, and it has stayed there ever since.
Driving west, as he’s doing now, is easier because the lake starts at the north edge of town and three of the four state routes cross town laterally in order to reach the opposite shore. Mark flows along with the one-way traffic through the timed lights, marveling as always at the large fraction of people who run reds, and the 100 percent of cops who witness it and do nothing.
Tonight he’s eating at Leslie’s Cafe. He crosses the tracks and the inlet, parks on the small street paralleling the state route. Locks the car, circumambulates to note the inarguably unlit head- and taillights.
He’s never been inside Leslie’s Cafe, though it has been in business since before his arrival in town. It occurred to him about three years ago that he was always returning to the same few restaurants, and all of a sudden it seemed ridiculous that after living here for so long there were still so many places he had never tried. He decided that once a week he would make a point of eating in a new place. His choice would have nothing to do with expectations that the food might be good, he would just work his way exhaustively through every establishment, including all the chains he’d never eaten in, like Applebee’s and Chili’s.
“Just one? Sit wherever you’d like.” The waitress swings past him with four bottles of beer on a round black tray. The place is nearly empty. He goes to a table in the far corner next to the sliding glass doors that look out
