In one of Mark Twain’s stories, an obscure 57-page satire titled “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” Twain transforms into a cholera microbe that lives on a putrid, filthy tramp named Blitzkowski. The germ world is a complicated one, with political factions, tribalism, and an astounding amount of wealth inequality. But the microbes know no world other than Blitzkowski: no other world than no other world than a single man’s flesh. Blitzkowski is a majestic and grand and beautiful place to call home.
Florida is the drunken tramp of America, an infested swamp of heat and dirt. Florida’s humans and Blitzkowski’s microbes tend to see their homes in an eerily similar way. The problem is elemental. There is very little to do in downtown Orlando at this time of year; for a while, this state of psychosomatic bliss was a great deal of fun for the old folks of Central Florida, but it has all grown a bit tiresome. Now, there’s a sinking feeling that all anyone can do in this back-water hellhole is nervously throw spoons at the wall.
Every Tuesday, a group of men wash the windows on the Orlando cathedral roof. It’s a cavernous Catholic cathedral with famous flying buttresses, which are photographed every year for the county Christmas card. The window-washers have to step over the buttresses, and their hips are always very sore. But they get great holiday bonuses and the buttresses are beautiful, so they have not unionized in 14 years.
A nursing home in Orlando sponsors a weekly bus to the cathedral that leaves promptly at 7:03, 9:25 and 10:11 on Tuesday mornings. Linda and Mark, two residents of the nursing home, go every week to watch the window-washers on the glass roof, except when it’s too sunny, because Mark had a melanoma scare in 2014. Linda does not know this, because he did not tell her. Mark texts her that his pectoralis minor is sore. Mark likes to play it cool around Linda because she has great legs and loves expensive bowls and cutting boards.
Mark has always felt a bit on-edge around Linda. One weekend, she invited him on a day trip to the Orlando Shopping Center, where the mall authorities had scheduled their bi-monthly window washing. Glass ceilings are so popular in Florida that you can watch them almost any day of the week. While they were browsing in a Lacoste, waiting for the show to begin, Linda made a smug remark about the type of men that wear mesh baseball caps. Mark wore a baseball cap almost everyday to protect himself from the Florida sun. What could he do now? He credited this comment to Linda’s abject lack of toadyism, an inevitable and sorry result of her grueling career as a child psychologist. But it bugged him.
Like Orlando, or Blitzkowski, the problem with Mark and Linda is elemental. Mark had this epiphany one gloomy Tuesday while sitting in a pew next to Linda. Mark had been born in early April, 1961, a few days before Yuri Gagarin had gone to space, while Linda had been born a few days after. It was one of those tragic and irreconcilable differences that had haunted Mark every night since. They operated on entirely separate planes; they would never really understand each other. Whenever he stared at Linda, he noticed that her right jaw twitched ever so slightly, a few times a minute. He reasoned that this twitching was an irrefutable cue from God about the dangers of Space-Race-based miscegenation. Mark knew that this was dangerous territory.
But in Orlando, where the weather is fair and sunny everyday, it is easy to lose track of time. Linda’s neck grew saggier; Mark’s toes grew yellower. Whenever they saw each other at the pool, Linda would tediously oil her bronzed thighs in front of Mark, and he felt nothing but a deep sense of affection. Mark took pride in being a moon-faced tee-totaler who never mentioned anything about Linda’s wine habit. He would gently rub her oiled leg and call her an “American beauty.” She took this as a petty insult about her weight. At a Yard Sale, he bought her a miniature portrait of a bleary-eyed girl with a sunhat; she found it depressing and gross and inaccrochable but still hung it over her powder room’s toilet.
And so the days passed pleasantly in Orlando, and Mark and Linda’s Floridian life was completely serene aside from the deep-seated and boiling thoughts of shame, guilt, and sadness. It became hotter and hotter, and Mark found that his whole world revolved around Linda, despite the fact that he didn’t particularly like her. Liking, after all, is entirely beside the point in Central Florida. Especially when dry land is a fleeting luxury.
The morning after Mark had successfully completed his seventh melanoma treatment, they went by shuttle to the cathedral. Linda had used handcuffs during sex, and Mark’s wrists were throbbing in anticipation. It was a big day. There had been a thunderstorm over the weekend and the glass ceiling would certainly be dirty.
But the problem with Central Florida is that it’s so terribly hot, and the sun is so terribly bright, that glass cannot withstand even the weight of a 40-year-old contract laborer. At 9:54 AM, Martin Plommer, a young man from Pensacola, plummeted through the glass cathedral roof and fell directly on the altar, a candlestick piercing his back. He was declared dead on the scene. Linda and Mark both started sobbing; but then Linda side-eyed Mark and felt a little miffed that he wouldn’t offer her a Kleenex, and Mark felt miffed that her sobs were so high-pitched. The blood dripped down from Martin Plommer. It dried quickly on the cathedral tile because the Florida sun is so terribly hot and so terribly bright.
The next day, Mark and Linda helped scrub the cathedral floor. They paid for Martin Plommer’s funeral and donated a large sum to his widow’s GoFundMe. They were good and honest citizens with pure hearts. And when the cathedral re-opened, they went every Tuesday morning and praised God for letting them live in Orlando.