Act I: The Rising

The town of Millerstown, Ohio did not die with a bang or a whimper. It died with a series of small, incremental decisions made by people who were not present, people in boardrooms in Chicago and New York and London who looked at spreadsheets and saw numbers that indicated that the steel mill, which had been the centre of gravity for the town for seventy years, was no longer profitable, and so they closed it, and the people who worked at the mill lost their jobs, and they moved away or they died or they became the kind of people who sat on porch steps at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday drinking beer and staring at the road that led to nowhere in particular, because everywhere else had already been tried and had already rejected them.

Frank Kowalski was one of those people. He was fifty-four years old, with a face that was the colour and texture of the rust that covered the abandoned rail cars that lined the tracks at the edge of town, and his hands were scarred from thirty years of working the furnaces, burns and cuts and chemical burns that had left his skin thick and discoloured and slightly numb, a condition that the doctors called peripheral neuropathy and Frank called getting old, which was what he called everything he did not have the vocabulary or the energy to describe more precisely.

He had been laid off in 2009, along with nine hundred and forty-seven other men and women who had worked at the mill, and he had collected unemployment for six months and then exhausted his benefits and then tried to find other work, but the jobs that were available in Millerstown were at the discount store on Route 62 and the McDonald's on the outskirts of town, and neither of them wanted a man of fifty-four who could not stand for eight hours without his knees protesting and who had been making twenty-eight dollars an hour at the mill and was now being offered eleven dollars and thirty-five cents at the discount store, which felt less like a job and more like an insult wrapped in a minimum-wage paycheck and handed to him by a manager who was twenty-two and had a degree in business administration and believed, with a conviction that was both sincere and insulting, that anyone who was not employed was not trying hard enough.

Frank stopped trying. He stopped going to the supermarket and started shopping at the food bank, which was located in the basement of the Methodist church and was run by a woman named Doris who had worked at the mill as a secretary for forty years and had watched her husband drink himself to death and her daughter move to Florida and her son die in a car accident on Route 62 and still show up every Thursday morning to hand out canned beans and canned peas and canned everything, because Doris believed that feeding people was the only thing that mattered in a world that had stopped mattering a long time ago.

Frank's house was a small bungalow on East Market Street that he had bought in 1987 with a mortgage that had been paid off in 2004, and it was his, free and clear, and that was the one thing that the mill closing and the unemployment and the exhaustion of benefits had not taken from him, and he clung to that ownership with a desperate, almost religious devotion, because the house was the last evidence that he had been a productive member of society, that he had contributed something to the world beyond the extraction of iron ore and its conversion into steel beams that were shipped to Chicago and New York and used to build buildings that would never know his name or his face or the fact that he had burned himself to keep them standing.

He spent his days drinking beer and watching cable television and listening to the sounds of the town around him: the occasional car on the street, the distant rumble of a train that was carrying coal rather than steel and therefore did not carry the same weight of meaning, the wind that blew through the abandoned lots and moved the trash and the leaves and the occasional piece of metal that had fallen off a truck and would never be picked up because nobody in Millerstown picked up trash that wasn't theirs and nobody in Millerstown had theirs anymore.

He spent his nights drinking whiskey and listening to the sounds of his own body, the creaking of his joints and the hum of his blood and the slow, steady pounding of his heart, which kept beating even though Frank could not understand why, because he did not know what he was living for, and the not-knowing was a weight that was heavier than anything he had carried at the mill.

Then the snake appeared in his basement.

Act II: The Undercurrent

Frank had gone down to the basement on a Saturday morning in October to retrieve a box of old tools that he had no intention of using but could not bring himself to throw away, because throwing things away was what people did when they had too much space and too much time and too little to occupy either, and Frank was trying very hard not to become that kind of person.

The basement was cold and damp and smelled of mildew and the faint, sweet odour of gas that leaked from the furnace, which had not worked properly since 2011 and which Frank had not had the money or the motivation to repair. He found the box of tools behind a stack of old newspapers and a broken lawn mower and a box of his wife's things that he had not opened since she had died, three years earlier, of ovarian cancer, which was the kind of disease that did not care whether you had health insurance or whether you had worked at the mill for thirty years or whether you had loved your wife with a devotion that was almost religious, because the disease had taken her anyway, and Frank had been alone ever since, and the alone-ness had become a physical presence in the house, sitting at the table where she had cooked and sleeping in the bed where she had slept and following him from room to room like a ghost that was not dead but was, for all practical purposes, as good as.

He bent to pick up the box, and he saw the snake.

It was in the corner of the basement, coiled around the base of the furnace, and it was enormous, a python of some kind, its scales the colour of oil and rust and the brown of dead leaves, and its body was thick as Frank's thigh and its length extended beyond the edge of his vision in both directions, and Frank stood there, in the cold, damp basement of his house, and he looked at the snake and the snake looked at him, and neither of them moved, and Frank felt a fear that was so profound and so absolute that it was almost peaceful, the peace of a man who has reached the bottom of something and found that the bottom is not so bad because it is solid and definite and real, as opposed to the top, which was the rest of his life, which was vague and uncertain and fake and full of decisions that he did not want to make and could not make and had been postponing for years.

The snake was not supernatural. It was not a curse or a blessing or a sign from God or the devil or anything that Frank had the vocabulary to understand except as a snake. It was a python, probably escaped from a private collection, because there was a breeder in Pennsylvania who sold exotic animals out of his barn, and one of his pythons had gotten out, or a man in Cleveland who kept a python as a pet had died and his relatives had not known what to do with it and had dumped it in the creek, and the python had swum or crawled or dragged its enormous body through the abandoned lots and the overgrown vacant lots and the drainage ditches and into the basement of Frank Kowalski's house, because the basement was warm, because the furnace, even though it did not work, still radiated a small amount of heat from the pipes that ran through it, and because the snake, like Frank, was looking for warmth in a cold and indifferent world.

Frank did not know what to do with a snake in his basement. He did not have a phone to call, because he had let his service lapse six months earlier to save the twelve dollars a month, and he did not know anyone who would come to his house and help him with a snake, because he had no one. So he did what he had always done when he faced a problem that he did not know how to solve: he drank.

He went upstairs and opened a beer and sat at the kitchen table and drank it and opened another and drank that and sat and thought about the snake and the warmth of the basement and the coldness of the rest of his life and the fact that he and the snake were, in many ways, not so different. Both of them were looking for warmth in a world that had stopped providing it. Both of them had ended up in places they had not chosen because the world had moved on without them. Both of them were, in their own ways, surviving, which was the lowest bar that existence had to clear and the highest achievement that anyone in Millerstown could claim.

Act III: The Breaking

Frank returned to the basement the next night, and he brought a shovel and a length of rope and a bottle of whiskey, because those were the tools he had available, and he was a man who worked with what he had and not with what he wished he had, which was perhaps the defining characteristic of everyone in Millerstown, which was perhaps the defining characteristic of everyone in America, for that matter, because the difference between the rich and the poor was not that the rich had different desires but that the rich had the resources to fulfill theirs and the poor had to make do with what they had and call it living.

The snake was still there, coiled around the furnace, and it moved toward him with a slowness that was either curious or threatening, and Frank could not tell the difference, and he did not care. He raised the shovel and brought it down on the snake's head, and the snake moved, and the shovel struck the furnace, and the furnace dent ed, and Frank felt a surge of rage that was not at the snake but at the furnace, at the house, at the town, at the mill, at the people in Chicago and New York and London who had looked at spreadsheets and decided that his life was no longer profitable, at his wife, who was dead and could not sit across from him at the kitchen table and tell him that it would be all right, which it would not, which was not all right, which would never be all right again.

He struck the snake again, and the snake struck back, its jaws closing around his left forearm with a force that broke bone and tore skin, and Frank felt pain, sharp and hot and real, and he felt something else, something he had not felt since the mill closed, which was purpose, because for the first time in years, he knew exactly what he needed to do: kill the snake, get it out of his basement, get it out of his house, get it out of his life, because the snake was an intrusion and an offense and a reminder that even in the small, private space that he had left for himself, the world was still entering and still taking and still destroying, and he was a man who had lost his job and his wife and his purpose and his future and he would not lose his house as well.

He struck the snake again, and again, and again, until the snake stopped moving and Frank was standing in the basement, breathing hard, his arm broken and bleeding and his face wet with tears that he did not remember shedding, and the snake's body lay on the concrete floor, and the furnace dent ed, and the house was silent, and Frank Kowalski was alone, as he had always been and would always be, and he felt something inside him settle and quiet and become, at last, still.

He wrapped the snake's body in a tarp and dragged it to the creek behind his house and threw it in and watched it sink beneath the brown, slow-moving water and disappear, and he walked home and he sewed his own arm with a needle and thread and a bottle of whiskey to steady his hands, and he went to bed and he slept for fourteen hours, and when he woke, the house was still empty and the town was still dying and the world was still moving on without him, and he made a beer and he sat at the kitchen table and he drank it and he opened another and he drank that too, and he did not feel different, because he was not different, because the snake and the furnace and the broken arm and the fourteen hours of sleep had not changed anything, because nothing in Millerstown ever changed, because the town was dying and the people were dying with it and the death was slow and gradual and unremarkable and nobody noticed, and Frank Kowalski was dying too, but his death was no different from any other death in Millerstown, which was perhaps the most Millerstown thing about it.

Act IV: The Echo

Nobody in Millerstown noticed the snake. Nobody noticed Frank's broken arm. Nobody noticed that he had stopped going to the food bank or that he had stopped watching television or that he had started sitting on his porch step at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday drinking beer and staring at the road that led to nowhere in particular. He became, in the space of a single week, indistinguishable from the other people in Millerstown, who had always been indistinguishable from one another, all of them men and women of fifty and sixty and seventy who had worked at the mill and had lost their jobs and had aged in place, surrounded by houses that were declining and streets that were emptying and a town that was slowly, patiently being absorbed back into the earth from which it had been extracted.

Frank Kowalski died in 2017, of liver failure and complications from peripheral neuropathy and what the coroner called undetermined causes, which was the coroner's way of saying that he had died in a way that was consistent with a lifetime of poor decisions and poor health care and poor nutrition and poor everything, and there was no one to dispute it, because there was no one who knew him well enough to care whether the coroner was right or wrong.

He was buried in a small ceremony at the St. Joseph cemetery, attended by Doris from the food bank and two men from the VFW post and a woman from the Methodist church who had known his wife and remembered her fondly and cried, quietly, at the grave, and after the service, everyone went home, and the rain fell on Frank's grave for three days, and the earth absorbed him, slowly and completely, and he became part of the soil of Millerstown, the same soil that had been poisoned by thirty years of steel production and that would never grow anything valuable again, and he joined the nine hundred and forty-seven other workers from the mill who were buried in unmarked sections of the same cemetery, and the town continued to die, slowly and gradually and unremarkably, and nobody noticed, because nobody in Millerstown noticed anything anymore, because they had all stopped looking, stopped caring, stopped believing that anything outside their own small, private spaces of decay and silence and beer and television mattered at all.

And the creek behind Frank's house kept flowing, slow and brown and indifferent, carrying the memory of a snake that had entered a man's basement and left it broken and alone and alive, and the man had killed it and wrapped it in a tarp and thrown it in the creek and the creek had carried it away and the water had closed over its body and the snake had sunk into the mud and the mud had absorbed it and the mud was part of the earth and the earth was patient and the earth did not care whether anyone noticed or not, and that was the truth of Millerstown, the truth of Frank Kowalski, the truth of the snake, the truth of everything: that it had happened and it had not happened, that it mattered and it did not matter, that it was real and it was not, and the creek kept flowing, slow and brown and indifferent, and the town kept dying, slowly and gradually and unremarkably, and the world kept moving on, and nobody noticed, and that was that.

--- OTMES v2 Objective Codes --- [OTMES] O:9 T:9 M:1 E:3 S:1 [Q] Does anything matter when the world is falling apart? [D] Dirty realism: a fired factory worker with chemical burns kills a python in his basement for selfish reasons; nobody in the dying town notices. --- END OTMES ---