Acid Rain

One day, there began an acid rain that never stopped.

This wasn’t just an average acid rain. Besides lasting, as I write this, several decades now, the other peculiar thing about this storm is that that acid is extremely potent. It can hurt, it can burn, it can kill. Within the first day, over two hundred people died directly from exposure to the rain, and over seven thousand people reported severe burns.

Like the Kennedy assassination, everyone remembers their location when it happened. I was in college, specifically my dorm room. My roommate, Calvin Miller, and I were using Lysol to try and mask the smell of cigarette smoke and weed when we heard the pitter-patter on the window.

“It’s raining.” Cal said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

And that’s all. Such a momentous occasion for all of human existence and all we said were those five simple words. It was only after we switched on our TV and saw our usual programming, Animal Planet, overwritten by a message urging us not to go outside that we thought something was suspicious. As dozens of death and injury reports rolled in from all across the world, we just sat there on our sofa, speechless about this rapid change in circumstance. Occasionally, I’d pick up my phone and call a friend or a family member, ask if they’re OK, but really all we did that first night was sit on that sofa and watch the pundits jabber.

When I finally forced myself to go to bed at three in the morning, I couldn’t sleep. The crashing of the acidic raindrops against my window was too deafening. Everyone would get used to the sound eventually, but I couldn’t sleep those first few nights. Though it did sound like each drop weighed a hundred pounds as they cascaded against our dorm room window, it was their metaphorical rather than physical weight that kept me up.

I got a resounding one hour of sleep and when I woke up at six, I found my neighboring bed unoccupied. Cal had woken up and left the room already. I threw on a sweatshirt and went to find him.

I found him in the first place I decided to check. He was in the rec room, just like he pretty much always was. I found him at his table, making impassioned markings on a big yellow legal pad.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Working on something.” Cal said.

“Right now?”

“Yeah. Is there a problem?”

“Well, no, it’s just given the circumstances, I didn’t think you’d…Well, whatever. Wanna grab breakfast?”

“Sure,” Cal said. “But let me finish this.”

When he finally lifted his thoroughly ink-stained hand, I could see a page filled with notes, sketches, marginalia of all kinds.

“Whoa,” I said. “What are you working on?”

“I’ll tell you over breakfast. Let’s go.”

We came to the residence hall’s cafeteria. The room was awash with talk of “the acid rain” and all the boys were screaming their opinions, as boys (especially college-aged boys) are wont to do. Someone declared it caused by global warming. Someone parried by saying scientists in support of global warming caused the acid rain to discredit global warming deniers. Some ardent libertarian announced it was a government conspiracy, a “declaration of war by the American government on its own people” to quote him exactly. Cal and I proceeded in silence to the buffet, grabbed our blueberry muffins, scooped some scrambled eggs onto our plates, and got some coffee. We sat down and Cal again produced his legal pad.

“I’ve got an idea.” Cal said.

“You always do.” I said.

“Everyone’s freaking out about how this acid rain, right?”

I needed merely to gesture at the three crusaders for truth currently engaged in a verbal joust of imagined high stakes in front of the orange juice dispenser.

“Yeah,” Cal said. “So anyway, I got this idea for an invention. I want to create an acid-resistant fabric. Something cheap, that everyone can buy. Not everyone’s gonna have hazmat suits. So, if I can just find some sort of way to make clothing out an easily attainable, acid-resistant fabric...I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Is it possible?” I said. It was a rhetorical question, for anything was possible when Cal had his notepad, the correct supplies, his table, and some spare time.

“I think so. I’m gonna need to get some materials though.”

After breakfast, while I trudged upstairs to overindulge in cable news for another five hours. When I suddenly remembered to check up on him, I found him in the rec room again, hunched over his table. Where his left hand was once black with ink, now it was red with blood.

“Jesus!” I said. “What happened?”

“Turns out,” Cal said, gesturing at a boxy machine next to him. “I don’t know how to use a sewing machine.”

“Oh. Well, besides that, how’s it going?”

“Very good. I got everything I need to get started on the project. If everything goes right, I might have a prototype ready in, I don’t know, a week.”

I walked over to his table. It was an impressively long platform, but every square inch of it was covered by ripped out legal pad pages, cloth and fabrics of all kinds, needles, thread, and a bunch I can’t even begin to name or understand. At the very edge of the table was Cal’s phone, which began to vibrate and nearly fall onto the floor when someone called. Cal snatched it up before he did and then, with the same swiftness, declined the call.

“Who was that?” I said.

“My mom.” Cal said. “She keeps calling me.”

“Well, she’s probably worried.”

“Why would she be worried?”

“Because of the acid rain.”

Cal then looked up, as if he had totally forgotten the reason he was trying to comprehend the machinations of a sewing machine, to begin with.

“Right.” Cal said. “I totally forgot.”

“So, you’re gonna call her back?”

“Maybe later.”

“Maybe later? She’s probably really worried about you. I’d call her up right now-”

“Well, I’m working right now. Jesus, Albert, just leave me alone, OK?”

That took me aback. Cal was usually so cool in his ways, so level-headed. Although in these times, I eventually concluded, one might expect breakdowns in even the most mild-mannered.

The next few days I spent watching cable news, as expected. I didn’t enjoy it, but I needed to watch it. I needed to be there to rejoice when Anderson Cooper suddenly popped on the screen, threw up his hands, and told us it was over. Even as I write this, such a thing has not happened, and my present self has his doubts that it ever will. But back in those first few days, we were all hopeful, all absolutely certain the end was right around the corner and that our lives didn’t have to go through rapid and uncomfortable change due to something completely out of our control, as is the central fear of all humankind.

Day five started out so well for me. Somehow, I think it was divine intervention, I turned off the TV, I ate a proper breakfast, I took a shower, I put on a fresh pair of clothes, and I walked out of the dorm room feeling at least marginally better. That feeling lasted all of about three seconds when I was suddenly approached by our neighbor, Kevin.

“Albert,” Kevin said. “Where the hell is Cal?”

“Don’t know.” I said. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“That bastard stole my microscope.”

Kevin, for being a microbiology major, had a body that intimidated me with its largeness. So I meekly spat out something about returning it to him once I found Cal before running off. I arrived in the rec room, expecting to find him there, but all I found was a colony of foul-smelling, unshaven, pajama-clad freshmen playing Mario Kart on the TV.

I went through every nook and cranny of the residence hall before, at last, finding him in one of the two unoccupied dorm rooms on the very top floor.

“Cal,” I said upon finding him, “How the hell did you get in here?”

“I broke in.” Cal said. “Come over here, look at this.”

Without his table, Cal had come to spread all his materials on the nearby bed. Among them was the microscope.

“Hey,” I said. “Kevin was looking for his microscope.”

“Well, he can keep looking. Look at this.”

And Cal shoved a sheet of a thick, rubbery, banana yellow fabric in my hands.

“Is this the fabric you’ve been working on?”

“Yup. Wanna test it?”

“No. Absolutely not!”

Cal was pale, emaciated, sickly-looking, and had huge black bags beneath his eyes, but he was genuinely elated. I could tell tat, regardless of what everybody else was feeling at this genesis of a new dark hour in the human story, Cal was overjoyed at having reached some new, personal zenith of existence.

“I just need a sewing machine.” Cal said.

“I thought you already had one.” I said.

“Yes, but it broke. I need a new one. Where can I get a new one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well then, why are you here?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought you knew I needed a sewing machine and came to show me where it is.”

“What? No, I came to get Kevin’s microscope back.”

Darkness shot down Cal’s face. Absolute coldness replaced absolute bliss.

“You’re not taking that microscope.”

“Cal, please, I-”

I leaned over to grab the microscope from Cal’s bed but suddenly fell backward. It took me a moment to realize it, but Cal kicked me. He snatched the microscope for himself before coming to stand over me.

“Albert. Leave.”

“No, Cal. Listen, I’m really worried that you’re-”

“That I’m what? Going to solve the world’s number one problem? I’m the good guy here, Al, quit acting like I’m not.”

“Cal. This isn’t right.”

The unoccupied dorm room was dark, but even I could see through the minimal light coming in from the acid-coated window the resolve in Cal’s eyes. I certainly wasn’t going to stop him now. No one could, except maybe God.

I fled the scene and came back to my dorm where I continued to watch CNN, just like the past four days with the only difference being that now I smelled a little better. Time ran away from me all at once, for the next I thing I knew, it was day six. Then day seven. The only reason I got off the sofa on day eight was that my stomach was growling so loudly and frequently that I couldn’t hear the TV.

Finding our fridge entirely empty, I resolved to go to the cafeteria. I walked outside the dorm and found the usual lively hallways of the residence hall entirely dormant, deprived entirely of all human sound, smell, and occupation. My mind, which was just now internalizing the radically painful headache I’d had for three days straight, didn’t pick up on this. The first hint came to me when I found the cafeteria doors locked.

I knocked and waited. Eventually, a horde of faces (including Kevin’s) swarmed the small window that looked into the cafeteria from the hallway and, all yelling raucously, opened the door and practically dragged me inside.

I found the group that came to welcome me was just a cadre. All the other boys were cowering beneath the tables.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“You’re Cal’s roommate, right?” Kevin said.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Cal murdered Brock Barnes.”

“Cal...what?”

“Murdered Brock. Strangled him. We found him dead in his dorm room.”

The rest of the boys concurred in murmurs.

“Brock Barnes.” I said. “Who was Brock Barnes?”

“A graphic design major.” Kevin said.

“Did he have a sewing machine?”

“Um…”

“Yes.” Someone in the crowd, presumably his roommate, said.

“I guess he did.” Kevin said. “But what’s that got to with anything?”

I explained to them all about Cal and his invention and our interaction three days prior.

“He killed someone over that?” Kevin said.

“I guess,” I said. “But are you all sure it was Cal? Like, what evidence do you have.”

“I saw him do it.” A voice in the crowd said.

“Me too.”

“Me too.”

I didn’t believe them. How could I believe them? Cal wasn’t a murderer. There has to be some kind of misunderstanding.

“I’ll go find him.” I said.

The crowd erupted with noise.

“Don’t go!”

“He’ll kill you too!”

“Don’t lead him back here!”

I ignored them. I went to leave the cafeteria when Kevin blocked me.

“Don’t do it, Al.” Kevin said.

“Relax,” I said. “Cal’s my best friend. He won’t hurt me. I’m just gonna go talk to him.”

I began to ascend the stairs. I stopped but once, on the third story, when I smelled something akin to rotten eggs marinated for seventeen years in manure. The smell was so overpowering and terrible that it stopped me dead. I thought there might be some kind of gas leak, but when I went to investigate, I didn’t find anything.

I eventually deduced the smell was coming from one of the dorms. I located the one in particular but then it hit me. The smell very might well be the deteriorating corpse of Brock Barnes.

I tried to put the smell out of my mind as I walked back towards the staircase, leaving the door firmly unopened. I eventually reached the very top floor. I heard noise from the door at the very end of the hall, the unoccupied dorm where Cal was set up.

I was shivering now. I inched toward the door and was about to knock when it suddenly burst open.

“Al?” Cal said, walking out. He was clad in a long, shockingly yellow coat.

“Cal,” I said. “What the hell are you wearing?”

“Like it?” Cal said. “It’s made of the fabric I invented. Here, let me show you.”

Cal began to walk to the staircase. I was wondering where he was going when I saw him begin to climb up. I then realized what was above the fifth floor. The roof. He was going to give me a demonstration. I gave chase and called after him.

“Cal! Cal, please! This isn’t a good idea.”

I dashed up to the enclosed chamber leading out to the roof. Cal and I could see the acid raid, slamming down against the roof. Cal lifted up the jacket’s hood and went outside.

“Cal! Cal, stop! I love you, Cal!”

He stood out in the rain. Walked right out into the acidic, burning torrent, standing in the center of the tennis court. I stood there and watched him because I felt deep down that’s what he wanted. Someone to watch him and his invention at work.

I carried a vague hope the jacket did indeed work, until he dropped dead of his acid burns.