Thom Bakker

(I’ve taken it out of 1st person and used my name instead. hope you don’t mind)

“Thom!”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Oh?” Thom said. He readjusted his pillow to put up a bit of a wall between him and Erik.

“Seriously – I’m just thinking.”

Thom waited for the paydirt. Waited for anything that would allow him to remain the silent party. He heard Tree snoring next to him.

“Ok,” Thom said. “What.”

“Have you ever wondered why people live up in places where there’s snow all winter? Like how did that get started? Why don’t people just live in places where you don’t have to buy lots of coats and have furnaces and insulation and all that. It doesn’t make any sense.”


“Well -” Thom didn’t know the answer, and now that he thought about it, it was sort of weird. All the same, he searched around for something he could say that was profound enough to send Erik back into another spiral of quiet thoughtfulness that would finally drag him into sleep. “Maybe too crowded in those places?” he said finally, knowing he was striking out. It was far too much to try to work out a full sentence. If he put any real thought into the matter he’d fully wake up.

“Yes, but – and I’ve thought of that – what about the Sahara desert? I mean come on – if millions of people are going to have to buy furnaces, couldn’t they just make the Sahara desert a nice place to live? Seriously, it’d be way easier.”

Thom thought about this and felt himself coming awake. In a last ditch effort to hang on to that last thread of sleepiness he said, “True. That’s true Erik. Good point.” Concede, that was the battle plan, concede and return to your dreamland, each to his own dreamland, rather, let Erik occupy his own damn. Dreams for one being a welcome respite from Erik. Thom rustled in what he thought was a definitive settling manner in his sleeping bag and said, “Yep.”

“And then there’s all the water. Like what about bringing down big chunks of good farm land from the winter areas and dumping that land in the water so that you could make a bunch of new islands. And then there’s the thing with how you were saying it’s Summer in the Southern hemisphere the same time it’s winter in the Northern? I mean couldn’t they make a big train that just jetted people back and forth? They’d need two houses -”

“Erik?”

“No listen seriously, they’d need two houses but wouldn’t you rather just take the train from one place to another rather than have natural gas pumped in from who knows where and all that? I mean if people are going to go about trying to solve all these environmental problems -”

“Erik?”

“-it just seems like they’re not really putting their heads together. Also -”


“Erik. Dude. I’m really interested in this conversation -”

“Good, right?”

“-but I’m tired as hell. Tree’s asleep. How come he always gets to sleep?”

Thom could hear the shrug happen from Erik’s sleeping bag. “He’s dreamboy,” Erik said. “That’s why we call him that. Anyway, I was thinking about global warming and how cool aluminum foil is and how it’s shiny like a mirror on one side. What if everybody just taped aluminum foil – the shiny side up – to their cars?”

“And?”

“And what? And it’d bounce all that sunlight back and it wouldn’t warm up the inside of your car. You know how hot a car gets when you get in it after it’s sat in the sun all day?”

“That is – actually – that’s strangely brilliant. You’d have to cover the windows too though.”

“Yeah, that’s tricky. Maybe you could just have a roll of foil built in and you could pull it up like you do with those kind of window shades that roll up. Maybe when you went to a gas station you could stick in a new roll of foil.”

“So you’ve thought about this.”

“Yeah!”

“That’s good, Erik. Sounds like a real market opportunity.”

“Thanks, Thom. I mean that. But I don’t want to do any of this stuff – I just want to think it. You know? I need some place where I can register ideas and people will just let me know when it gets done.”

“Go to sleep, Erik.”

“OK big guy.”


“Sleep well.”

Erik went through a few minutes of thrashing, presumably to get properly comfortable. Thom leaned toward Erik set a boundary so that as soon as Erik was settled he could retreat to his real sleeping spot.

“Just think of it!” Erik said as Thom was just beginning to drop off to sleep. “Aluminum cars! The summer train!”

“Mm.” Thom said and could hear all the ways in which the answer was not satisfactory to someone like Erik, and so in one last swing he batted everything he had and said, “Your future is truly awesome, Erik.”

But Erik was already asleep.