Entropy

“The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been winds of gale force and the day before that the sun had made the city glitter bright as April, though the calendar read early February. It is a curious season in Washington, this false spring.”

The unpredictability of the weather contrasts, in this story, with the eerie steadiness of the temperature and mirrors the unpredictable behavior of the story’s characters. The weather and the temperature together illustrate two central and contradictory aspects of entropy, which is a state of simultaneous stasis and chaos. 

“Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, or national politics, of any civil disorder.” 

Callisto has designed his apartment to be its own ecosystem, unaffected by the outside world. Yet it is the very self-contained regularity of his environment that makes it vulnerable to entropy, as he himself is aware. He knows entropy to be the flaw in a system, and he knows that no system is perfect. In hiding out in his apartment, he is merely trying to stave off the inevitable. 

“But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of apocalypse, Callisto shivered beneath the covers.” 

It seems absurd that Callisto would see an omen of the apocalypse in a steady temperature, and on one level, it shows the extreme brittleness and claustrophobia of his world. His existence in his apartment is so well-ordered that the slightest signs of disorder strike him as apocalyptic. Yet on another level, his paranoia is prescient, an alertness to underground realities that Meatball and his friends continue to evade.