Sand

Gadi woke up in bed inside a thin layer of sand.

No, no, no.
He lay there a few more moments, letting his consciousness come back from the night.

Slowly his personality returned, as if cast into an empty mold.
The memories returned.

And then the new realization hit him: the bed really was covered in sand.

He got up to brush his teeth.

Sand all over the house.

"I don't even know how to start dealing with this."

"Fuck it, we'll go to work and see about it later."

Going down the sand-covered stairs he was careful not to lose his footing, gripping the banister with hands slippery from dry sand.
Outside, a strong wind blew, carrying sand.

As he unlocked his bike, his upstairs neighbor passed him, shaking sand out of his shirt.
"What's with all this sand?" the neighbor asked.
"Seven hours of housecleaning, that's what it is," Gadi answered, blinking the sand out of his red eyes.

On the news they said a rare, powerful wind had carried tons of sand up from the delta in Egypt.
"An event like this happens once every few hundred years," they said.
"The climate crisis."

Two hours later the reports were already coming in from all over the world.
Nonstop winds everywhere.
And sand.
Millions of tons of sand.

And the wind did not stop for five years.

At first people still looked for someone to blame.

Experts and big names on the news offered a range of explanations for the phenomenon, but most of them took shelter under the meteorological umbrella and sounded scientific enough to reassure anyone who still wanted to be reassured.

After the accusations came the griping phase.
Everyone complained about the sand: the discomfort, the trouble breathing, the danger.

Language, of all things, adapted to the new reality faster than its speakers did.
Every language picked up new adjectives for the various degrees of "being covered in sand," plus dozens of words for the physical states of sand, mud, and suffocation.

The new vocabulary provided a solid infrastructure for detailed complaints and precision whining.

At first Gadi tried not to take part in it.
People at work griped about the morning sand, the sand that sticks, the sand that stings, the sand that comes in on the low wind out of the west.
He nodded, blinked, and mostly said, "Yeah, no kidding."

Griping became a language of intimacy.
People asked "How much got in at your place?" instead of "How are you?" and answered with more honesty.
For one guy it came in through the window.
For one woman, through the AC.
The whole world became a footnote to sand.

But Gadi took no part in this festival.
He had always been the type to suffer in silence.

Complaining never got old, but hearing other people complain got old fast.

The griping gave way to snobbery.
Sand connoisseurship.

At work a group of regular complainers formed around the coffee machine.
They stood there in the morning shaking out their sleeves, emptying their shoes into the sand bin, and trading notes on the quality of the storm as if it were wine.

Gadi walked past them every day and promised himself he would not get sucked into it.
But after a week he found himself muttering that today the sand had a metallic smell.
Everyone looked at him with respect.
Some with envy.
From that day on they talked more about smell, and asked for his opinion.

Gadi developed a moderate position: the morning sand really was more bearable than the evening sand.
Morning sand was dry, almost businesslike.
Evening sand arrived after a whole day of life.
It came off sweat, off sidewalks, off engines, off people.
That was sand with baggage.
"Give me morning sand," he would say, "and I'll give you a reconciled man."

People started getting used to it.

After a while Gadi had trouble explaining to himself what had been so strange about that morning.
Sand in the bed seemed like a starting point.

Sand redefined home, street, and body, along with the relations among them.
Life became endless maintenance.

Gadi set up a small staging area by the door: flashlight, dust goggles, ear and nose plugs, wet wipes, a bag for shoes, a folded undershirt, vacuum-sealed.
He used to keep only keys and a wallet there.
Now the door was a departure checkpoint, and the house was starting to look like a border.

He stopped asking whether the house was clean.
The answer was always no.

The new question was whether you could live in it until tomorrow.
Most evenings the answer was yes, under certain conditions.

He started keeping sand in designated places around the house.
A bin by the door for shaking out the protective suit and the pockets.
A box by the bed for the grains that fell out of his hair.
A jar in every room, a drawer in the kitchen.

To Gadi's delight, he had a talent for coughing.

He did not even need to take the cough-and-sneeze course, the way all his coworkers had to.

But the lungs were only one department of the disaster.
The stomach demanded attention too.
And here agriculture entered the picture, or what was left of it.
Only root vegetables survived.
Fruit became nostalgia.

Humanity switched to seaweed, grown at sea on enormous floating platforms.

The first time he tasted seaweed, Gadi understood that humanity would survive, but nobody was going to enjoy it.
It had a faint taste of salty mud, the smell of a dock, and the texture of something someone had already chewed and regretted.

It arrived in a small plastic container.
Inside, waiting for him, was something shiny, dark, folded in on itself like a tiny dramatic rag.

The first bite was tolerable.
That was the problem.
Gadi had expected an obvious horror, something you could refuse with dignity: not the kind of refusal that gets you called spoiled, but the kind that means you have red lines.

Instead he got food that was gray in culinary terms.

Other people around him tried to be optimistic.
They said it reminded them of old wilted spinach.
They said it reminded them of sushi, just without the tasty parts.

Gadi listened to them and chewed, and understood that people are willing to lie to themselves long before they are willing to be hungry.

But very soon even the seaweed started to suffer from the climate, and sure enough, a global famine developed.

Gadi started dreaming about peaches.

Over time the mouth became the central organ of the era.
The nose had been clogged for a long time.
The mouth was left alone with all of it: coughing, spitting, breathing through cloth.
Gadi just wanted to stop chewing the air he breathed.

Hearing was muffled, vision partial, touch blocked by gloves and sand.
Adult Gadi, like baby Gadi, experienced the world again through his mouth alone.
He didn't want it like that.

But what bothered him most was romance.

It did not survive the logistics.

Everyone started keeping to themselves.
Spontaneity disappeared.
Love at first sight was not possible when every glance passed through two plastic windows, two filters, condensation, and a screen of sand.
On dating sites people started listing seal rating, filter settings, and date of last cleaning.

Gadi discovered that he was filtering women by their filters.

He tried to put into words what he was missing.
A voice without a filter.
A smell without plastic.
A look that arrives on time.
A hand that shows up without advance preparation.
The new world had turned the face into private property.
Gadi missed the era when people threw their faces into the street without understanding what a waste it was.

There were moments when he even missed the era when it was easy to get hurt.
A cold look, an evasion, a small refusal.
In the new world even romantic pain required preconditions.

At night, before sleep, he found himself bringing his palm up to his face and breathing into it.
A faint smell of skin, wet wipe, and sand.
It was the closest thing to another person he had that day.

And then, after five years, it suddenly started to rain.

To everyone's relief, the pouring rain turned all the sand to mud and washed it out to sea.
For the first time in five years the streets were clean.
Humanity breathed easy.

The rain fell.
And kept falling.
And did not stop for thirty years.

And Gadi started dreaming about morning sand.