The future was bleak for Martin Abarough. He sat in his vile apartment, emptily staring at the raindrops streak down the dirty window, listening to what he could of an NPR broadcast from his broken radio. The walls of his apartment were visibly dirty, probably because the various tenants before Martin were addicts who couldn’t have been of the right mind to maintain the space. The scuttle of rats and other critters surrounded Martin, but they never intruded his room, as he had proven to them that he had no attachment to rat-life. Though immutably filthy, the space was neat and organized; the order of his apartment guaranteed a sort of sanctuary to Martin.
The shift he just finished at Shanghai Glory, a dingy little Chinese restaurant, had ended in disaster. He had washed dishes for ten hours straight, only taking a smoke break at the halfway point, and the pressure to clean dishes quickly enough to ensure a functioning restaurant, as well as the constant Chinese jabs thrown at him, just pushed him too far, and he screamed profanities directly in the face of his boss and the owner of Shanghai Glory, Arnold Zhang. Arnold took Martin’s verbal attacks sitting down on a crate in the alley behind the restaurant, and when they finished, he flicked his mostly unashed cigarette at Martin’s chest, stood up, gave Martin his check, and went into the restaurant to finish closing without another word. Martin stood for a few moments in the alley, wordlessly exasperated, and then took off to his apartment.
So he sat, not sad or angry, but completely emotionally absent. The episode with Arnold wasn’t a cause of any of his dejection, but evidence of it. He was properly called Dr. Martin Abarough, as he had completed a doctorate in Systematic Theology at Marquette, but his unimpressive thesis and an over saturation of PhDs caused him to be unable to find a research or teaching position anywhere in the country. So immediately following the completion of his thesis, he was unemployed, and lived out of his car for a while. He worked himself to the bone, and the Upper Peninsular winter hit hard, but in the Spring, he meandered southward into Wisconsin, found his current $500/mo. room just outside of Milwaukee, and had time to consider what he could do to get out of abject poverty. Thus far, he could think of nothing.
Truthfully, he could not remember the last time he was essentially happy. His days were filled with hard, monotonous work that he accomplished for meager wages, and spent most of his time in his wretched apartment. He never spoke to anyone, save for Arnold, but he never noticed his isolation. His once exceptional brain was usually muddled as a result of a lack of sleep, and he went about the motions with a complete absence of mind. Furthermore, he had lost the intense supernaturalistic faith that he had while at Marquette, and had not the time to regain it. These are not the conditions of a happy person.
Martin’s condition had not deterred his love of reading and learning and philosophizing; deteriorated tomes were strewn about his desk. He took one up, The Confessions of St. Augustine, and read for a time. Most every evening was spent in this manner. He had no television in his apartment, and he had no room in his miniscule budget for a phone bill, so all he had to entertain himself with was his radio and his books. The eastern sky had long begun to darken, and the western’s brilliant palette of reds and oranges began to slip into shadow. He took a brief, frigid shower, and resigned to his sleeping corner which consisted of a mattress, a fitted sheet, a bare pillow, and a thin blanket. His stomach longed for some form of nutrition, but the times simply didn’t allow for food every day, so he ignored his nature, and fell into a fitful sleep. In all this, Martin felt no happiness or goodness, forced as he was into this destitute way of living.
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The former half of the day has an air of awesome, essential goodness. The light of the morning falls without harshness or brutality on the Earth, but with grace and welcome. In the months in which the day is substantially warmer than the evening, morning light is further diluted by fog, though this fog is not mysterious or foreboding, but makes the morning’s atmosphere fuzzy and comfortable.
Such was the morning after Martin’s argument with Arnold. The soft orange light of the sunrise fell on his face, and gently lifted him up and out of his shallow somnolence. Martin wasn’t drowsy or disoriented upon his awakening, but filled with that which ought to be the necessary consequence of rest, though oft is not. He arose from his sleeping corner and dressed in his everyday jeans, and threw on one of the few shirts he cycled through. He gazed out of the window while the kettle boiled a cup of tea, brewed from stale leaves. The view of the Milwaukee slums in which he resided was uncharacteristically wonderful. The sun was low on the painted eastern sky, and the full brilliance of its light was impeded by clouds and the fog. The buildings were enveloped by the fog, and couldn’t distract from the majesty of the sunrise. He sipped his tea, and watched his sunrise, and noticed that the non-being that he had experienced since his completion of graduate school had become filled with a reverent appreciation for the Transcendent that sat before him.
He switched on his broken radio, and out came the supernatural compositions of John Fahey. The simple instrumentals that poured out of that radio spoke to the deepest crevices of Martin’s spirit, the Ground of his soul, in a way that only the most lauded poetry could ever hope to. Just as Fahey plucked the strings of his steel-string guitar, Martin felt his essence plucked at. The opuscules, though melancholy and indeed minute, conveyed their meaning with a sense that couldn’t be replicated in plain prose. The music, the sunrise, and the emergence of Martin’s self after months and months of hiddenness moved him to tears. He wept out of an appreciation for beauty and goodness that enveloped his entire being, and held on to the intense presentness of that appreciation for as long as he could.
When his eyes dried, and he came back into temporal subjectivity, Martin was made anew. His dejection that characterized his existence up until that morning was gone for good, and was replaced with an entrenched gladness at the goodness of being that showed itself at even the most minute things. The glow of the streetlamps, the warmth of the water that he washed dishes in, the whistle of wind as it came through his unsealed window; all of these things brought him unbridled joy.
The future remained bleak for Martin Abarough, but with the beauty of everything around him, he is supremely content in the present.
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