WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?

He’s doing it again.

I stare out the window and watch as an autumn leaf tumbles on a breath of wind. I’m envious. Of the leaf, of the wind. I turn back to Roger, who hasn’t touched his omelet or hash browns. I finished my breakfast sandwich fifteen minutes ago. He’s on his third cup of coffee and I wonder if I should ask his doctor about his caffeine intake.

“...everything for granted,” Roger is saying. “We’re asleep. Nobody ever thinks about where all of this stuff comes from.”

I tune back out. He used to notice when my eyes glazed over and would ask if I was listening. Now he just keeps talking. I don’t think he really cares if I’m listening or not, he just needs to say it out loud.

I glance over at a young couple sitting at a nearby booth. They’re having a conversation. I can’t hear what it’s about, but they’re both laughing, enjoying each other’s company.

“Take this fork for example,” Roger says. He picks up the plain metal fork that, until now, had been sitting untouched next to his plate. “How does this thing go from iron in the ground to a fork in my hand? People never think about this stuff.”

I smile at him. “You do.”

He seems surprised - I don’t think he expected me to say anything. “Yes. I do. It’s about all I can think about.”

I know.

“But…but think about it. Someone has to mine - literally mine - the iron, ship it somewhere to be melted down, poured into a mold, and then cooled into this thing.” He sets the fork down next to his plate. “Not to mention that before any of that happens, someone has to make the mold. How do they do that? The entire operation requires an immense amount of planning and resources. Just for a fork.”

The young couple’s food arrives. They pause their conversation to eat. After a couple of bites, they swap plates.

Roger says, “The logistics are truly mind-boggling. Then someone has to bring this whole operation to scale, make millions of these, and ship them all over the world to thousands of diners like this one. For a profit. And they’re not charging an arm and a leg. I bet restaurants like this can buy them in bulk for pennies on the dollar.”

Our server comes over to check on us. She asks if we want a box for Roger’s omelet. Roger ignores her, picks up his fork again, and says “Do you know how much this diner paid for this fork?”

Our server looks like he just asked her for directions to Neptune. “Um, why?”

Roger smiles. “I’m curious.”

She recovers, smiles back at him. “Sorry. I don’t handle that part of the business. Do you want me to see if my manager knows?”

He sets the fork down again. “No, that’s okay. But I could use a top-up on my coffee.”

She obliges, then leaves.

He starts up again, moving on to the unlikely nature of the basic existence of pretty much everything, from screws, to rubber bands, to airplanes. I sigh and look down at my hands. The wrinkles, gifted by time, have become a comfort. My wedding ring, once cleaned by a jeweler annually, now a muted silver-gray.

But still there.

I look up at my husband, his unruly eyebrows now only partially hidden behind his signature thick black frames. At 68, he still has a full head of hair, a genetic gift, most of it gray these days. His icy blue eyes still have the sharp curiosity in them that I fell in love with when we were 25. He looks like an editor for the New York Times.

I do still love him. I always will, I suppose.

We used to go for walks. We used to travel. He retired early so we could enjoy new places. Then he started noticing things. Things that he says don’t make sense. Everything manmade seems impossible to him, from the largest structures to the smallest tools. The perfectly round metal railing on a flight of stairs. Each piece of plastic, metal, and glass in a cell phone. The threads used to make the shirt on his back. And with all the time he has, all the research he does, his questions never get answered.

“You know that office building downtown they built a couple of years ago, corner of Elm and Tucker?” He points west. “Remember when we’d see it on the way to the library, that massive crane lifting beams twenty stories into the air?”

I nod.

“How did they build the crane? With another crane? Then how did they build that crane? You ever see a crane that size being assembled? Of course not. They just sort of appear. How?”

It’s not that Roger is asking bad questions. It’s just that he’s asking them of me, as though I have the answers. And, these days, I don’t even think he’d care if I did know the answer.

“The more you break it down, the less sense this makes.”

Tell me about it.

“How do they make the crossbars of the crane? Long rods that are the perfect length, metal welded to metal. The screws and bolts that hold everything in place. How do they connect everything without another crane? Think about all the miniscule parts, every nut and bolt, each made in some forge from the things we dug out of the earth halfway around the world, then shipped to a factory where a part of the crane is assembled, then those parts are all somehow put together to make the sophisticated equipment that builds these towers. Not to mention every other piece of a skyscraper, the walls of glass, the flooring, the electrical systems, all of it. Just for one building. And there are thousands, in every city all over the world. It’s just…unfathomable.”

He pauses, looks out the window. There’s a fine film of sweat along his brow.

“Roger?”

He turns back to me.

“Why does this matter so much to you?”

He looks back out the window. I’ve asked him this before, of course. He usually responds with some form of indignation, as if he’s the enlightened one and the rest of us who don’t care about this stuff are dullards. This is the first time he seems to really be contemplating my question.

“Because,” he says, “if we can’t know how this stuff works, how can we know that anything is real?”

He turns back to me. I’m surprised to see him holding back tears.

I reach across the table and take his hand. It’s trembling slightly.

“Do you feel my hands on yours?”

“Yes.”

“That’s real. This,” I nod at the space between us, “is real.”

He looks down at our hands and gently rubs the back of mine. A short laugh escapes as he looks up and wipes at his face.

“But how do we know?”

“What else could it be?”

#

We’re walking along Poplar, a couple streets away from home, a place where the developers’ dreams of homogeneity have miraculously faltered. The trees here are old and gorgeous in early autumn, and the houses are mostly well-kept and varied in style. It won’t be long before they are sold to flippers, demolished, and replaced with cookie-cutter monstrosities too big for the lots on which they stand.

Marie and I hold hands as we walk. I glance over at her. I’m envious. She’s unbothered by the inconsistencies around us. When Marie sees an airplane, she sees an airplane. She does not see five hundred thousand individual parts, each of which had to be made (perfectly!) from the basic elements available on earth, shipped to a manufacturer, and assembled into an amazing feat of engineering. She does not wonder how that happens, how anyone makes a profit from it, or if it’s even real.

Our neighbor Greg is out in front of his house, watering a small vegetable garden. Greg claims to be a day trader. He sees us approach and waves.

“Beautiful afternoon for a walk,” he says.

“Sure is,” Marie responds. “How are the sweet potatoes this year?”

He laughs and gestures toward his feet. “Hopefully still growing. Another month or so and I’ll pluck them out.”

“Let us know if you have extra,” Marie says. “Homegrown are always so much tastier than store-bought.”

“You got it,” Greg says. “Enjoy your walk.”

We keep moving, and when we’re out of earshot, Maries squeezes my hand. “Maybe we should take up gardening.”

I laugh. “Marie, in the forty-plus years you’ve known me, what makes you think I would be able to keep a garden?”

“Well, you raised two kids. How hard can it be to raise some tomatoes?”

“You have a point.”

“I just think it might be good to get you into a new hobby.”

“I have hobbies.”

She glances at me out of the corner of her eyes. “Pointing out things that confuse you isn’t a hobby,” she says.

I know she means it playfully, but the comment rankles me. “Blindly accepting the things that don’t make sense makes you…”

She stops, lets go of my hand.

“Makes me what?”

“Forget it.”

“No, Roger. Makes me what? An idiot?”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Of course not, because you never talk about anything else, you insufferable ass! You don’t ask about me. You don’t ask what I want to do with the few years we have left. You don’t ask what would make me happy. You don’t ask about us. Because you don’t care.”

“Of course I care. I love you.”

She scoffs. “You just don’t know any better, you old fool.”

She’s not wrong.

“What do you want me to say? That I don’t care about the things that don’t make sense? Should I just ignore that there might be something bigger to our existence that we don’t understand?”

“I just think you’re obsessing over it. If you don’t understand it, figure it out. Go to the library and do some research. Call the university and talk to some engineers. Ask a chatbot. You’re smart, you’re retired, and it’s not like you don’t have time. But instead, you just pepper me with these questions I can’t answer for you.”

We start walking again in silence. We’re not holding hands.

I ask, “What do you want to talk about?”

“Literally anything other than how the world doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn’t make sense, Roger.” She sighs. “It never has.”

We arrive home and walk up the driveway. “So we just give up trying to understand?”

“No, dammit, I just–” She takes a breath. “I don’t know how much time we have left. Neither do you. Do you want to spend it asking these endless questions, or do you want to spend it enjoying whatever time we have?”

I sigh, sit down on the porch steps. “I feel the fleeting time, Marie. I really do. And I’m not trying to annoy you.” I think about saying more, that the ticking clock means these questions are even more important. That I don’t want to shuffle off not knowing the answers.

Marie sits next to me, rests her hand on my knee.

“Roger, I love you. God knows why, but I do. But here’s the thing - I’m not willing to keep doing this. You need to decide if you want to spend your time with me, enjoying this confusing, beautiful, fucked-up world, or spend your time obsessed with your questions.”

I look at her. She’s crying, and I can feel the weight she’s carrying.

“I’m not going to spend my final years listening to this stuff. I don’t care if a screwdriver shouldn’t actually exist. I just don’t. Because it does, and I don’t need to question it. It’s just not that important.”

She takes my hand, blinks away the tears.

“I’m going inside. Why don’t you stay out here and think about what you want?”

She squeezes one last time, stands up, and heads inside.

#

The sun reflects across the gulf, glinting on the gentle waves. The air carries a pleasing scent of magnolia from a nearby hotel, with a hint of salt from the ocean. Marie is reading a magazine - Vogue, maybe - sunglasses pulled down to the tip of her nose. Her sun hat casts a broad shadow over her face.

She pushes her glasses back up her nose and glances out at the ocean, thinking about what could have been. Wondering where she would be right now if Roger had not made the choice he made. Here, perhaps, or somewhere else. A philosophical question Roger would appreciate, she thinks, smiling. Schrödinger’s Retiree: sipping on a rum and Coke at this beach or another, unknown as to which until you cared to look.

Next to Marie, Roger admires his wife for a moment, then turns back to the book he’s reading. The Matter with Things, by McGilchrist. Not exactly a beach read, but its exploration of epistemology and metaphysics helps center Roger’s brain in a more productive philosophical place.

He still has questions. But he’s finding places to ask those questions without driving Marie crazy. Like the book club he joined with other retired, restless, likeminded folks. He suspects they might see him as a little nutty, but at least he gets them thinking and they haven’t thrown him out. Yet.

Marie reaches over and lays her hand on Rogers’s arm. He looks up at her.

“Not a bad way to spend a Wednesday, is it?” he asks.

She smiles. “No, honey. It’s about perfect.”

Paul R. Klein is a father, husband, lawyer, and writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He loves hiking with his wife and sons through the local forests, and listening to the tales of both his kids and the trees. His work has appeared in The Sink, Horror Garage, On the Premises, The Binnacle, and more.