by BRIAN HALL
Since there does exist one small piece of evidence suggesting that broadcasting and/or exploring civilizations are not common in the universe (i.e., Where is everybody?), then somewhere along the developmental line from habitable world to bustling spaceports lies what astronomers like to call the Great Filter. Of course he has gut feelings. Even he is human. (He blames Mette’s mother for the fact that this phrase intrudes on his thoughts once or twice a week.) Despite his reasoning earlier, if he were forced to guess he would say that analogs of prokaryotic life are probably common in the universe. He finds it compelling that bacterial life is so resourceful and tenacious, thriving at extreme temperatures, surviving for millions of years within rocks and meteoroids. Not that tenaciousness once alive really says anything about the probability of coming alive in the first place—but hey, that’s what gut feelings are for.
He remembers a charming anecdote—he thinks it was about the physicist Freeman Dyson, or maybe Niels Bohr, he’s not sure. Anyway, a visitor to (let’s say) Dyson’s office, noticing that he had a horseshoe mounted on the wall, exclaimed, “Surely, Mr. Dyson, you don’t believe that a horseshoe brings good luck.” Whereupon Dyson replied, “Of course not. But they tell me it brings good luck whether you believe in it or not.”
As for the Great Filter, there are two periods of time on Earth that give Mark “pause,” as they say. The first is that 3.5 billion years during which the prokaryotes seem to have invaded every conceivable niche on Earth, yet failed to figure out how to become eukaryotic and multicellular. Three and a half billion years is an awfully long time. The second is the 600 or so million years during which multicellular life speciated into a plethora of forms, was forced to redo it from the ground up at least five times after mass extinctions, yet did not develop the intelligence necessary for brewing beer and building back decks. In particular, Mark regards the 170-million-year reign of the dinosaurs with unease. Earth’s climate was stable, usable energy was abundant, and thousands of species of dinosaurs ruled. Yet all they did was drool.
Of course, the Great Filter might be in front of us. It’s possible that the rise of intelligence is common, but that technological civilizations don’t last long. When Mark was younger, people usually thought of nuclear war in this connection, but today most scientists would probably bet on resource depletion and environmental degradation. Intelligence is probably not a smart evolutionary strategy. While the dinosaurs drooled for 170 million years, the conditions in which they thrived remained relatively unchanged. Does anyone think that Earth’s ecosystem will survive the onslaught of human industrial ingenuity for a fraction of that time in some recognizable form? Forget a million years, forget a hundred thousand. Mark wouldn’t bet on one thousand. In cosmic terms, that’s less than a blink of the eye.
Here’s Mark’s bet: human ingenuity, rather soon, will cause a mass extinction event. Intelligence might survive the initial collapse, but won’t endure afterward longer than a few thousand years. Ecosystems will evolve and species will speciate and hundreds more millions of years will go by, with more extinction events, caused by this and that (volcanism, asteroid impact, cosmic ray burst, supercontinent desertification, snowball Earth events), after each of which life will recover and again diversify. There’s no reason to think it inevitable, or even likely, that intelligence will rise again, but if it does, it will bring on another environmental collapse in short order. The Sun will continue to get hotter. The seas will boil away. The atmosphere will be stripped off by the solar wind. Eventually, only underground bacterial life will remain. Then the Sun will bloat, burp, make a small fuss, and Earth will be incinerated. What will be left is a white dwarf inside a cloud of expanding gases whose constituent atoms are excited by solar radiation and emit photons as they calm down, resulting in the celestial object misnamed a “planetary nebula.” Some of these are extraordinarily beautiful, as the clouds nested within clouds glow at different parts of the spectrum. When Mark was an undergraduate he knew a professor who would end his lecture on planetary nebulae by expressing the hope that, five billion years from now, when Earth is gone, an intelligent creature on some distant planet in the Milky Way might train its telescope on our former Sun and say, “Wow, will you look at that one! That’s a real pretty one.”
He’s falling asleep.
Mette.
His eyes fly open. He hears her mother’s voice, “Mark—fuck! Pass the test!”
He fumbles for his phone on the bedside table, is dazzled by the awakened screen, types without forethought, I guess I’m a little worried. Could you send me a note? Sends it.
PART TWO
1935–1951
“Your first word, sweetheart, was ‘kitty.’”
Genny is looking at a photo of her tiny self, reaching out a dimpled hand to a calico cat. Calico cats are always girls, isn’t that funny? Genny is six.
“I want a cat,” she says.
But her mother has told her a hundred times.
“I want a little brother,” Genny says.
“Don’t be fresh.”
She wants to be fresh. “Why can’t I?”
“Aren’t we a happy family, you and me and Daddy?”
“I want one!”
This gets her a smack on the bottom. “You’ve hurt Mommy’s feelings. Go to your room.”
She goes, failing not to cry, furious, bereft.
* * *
• • •
Genny lives in Washington, DC, on Harrison Street, in a square brick house painted white in a line with other houses that look kind of different but are all the same size and shape. Every house has a narrow back yard and there are no trees or bushes, so you can stand there looking through the wire to the other yards and keep hoping to see other children.
* * *
• • •
Genny and her mother are visiting her grandparents on the farm in Alabama. Daddy has to keep working at his office in DC. He works for the Bureau of Public Roads.
Grampa Stoakes has chickens in the back yard. Genny wants to hold one. She chases them, but would never hurt one. Grammie Eula showed her how to twist the neck for dinner, but she refused to do it. Grammie told her it hardly mattered to a chicken.
For the family photo, cousin Bob is holding a hen, and Genny makes a fuss until she can hold it.
Grampa Stoakes has been losing chickens at night, and he declares he’s sure a nigger is stealing them.
“More likely a fox,” says Grammie Eula.
Grampa sits up two nights straight with a shotgun. “I always wanted to shoot me a nigger,” he says. He talks whiffly because he doesn’t have any teeth.
Nothing happens except he gets tired. “Looks like the fox is too smart for you,” Grammie Eula says.
Genny thinks Grammie Eula is smart and Grampa Stoakes is stupid.
“You wouldn’t take your eyes off that stupid chicken,” her mother says when they look at the photos later. “Everyone else is looking nicely into the camera.”
* * *
• • •
“You wouldn’t even nap right until you were six months old. I kept putting you on your stomach and you’d roll onto your back. Then you’d wake up and fuss when I put you the right way down again.”
Her mother talks a lot about regularity. “Did you do your business this morning?” If Genny has a stomachache it’s because she hasn’t had enough B.M.s. She sits on the toilet, waiting.
Every April she gets the dose of strychnine. This is her spring cleaning and it sure does work. It also makes her heart race.
Once a week her mother makes her drink hot lemon juice. “Constipation is a bad habit,” she says. “We’re teaching the bowels a new habit.”
“But I’m not constipated.”
“You can thank your mother.”
* * *
• • •
In summer on the Alabama farm she see
s her cousins. Her mother has seven siblings. Aunt Jillie is smart. Aunt Iris is stupid. Uncle Torrance is smart. Uncle Milton is stupid. Aunt Eugenie is really stupid.
Frank is one of Aunt Iris’s boys. He’s two years younger than Genny, and he follows her around, marveling at everything she does. His mother is extra religious and she won’t let her boys cuss or tell jokes or do anything. Genny takes Frank aside and teaches him a joke:
What did the brassiere say to the hat?
“You go on ahead, and I’ll give these two a lift.”
* * *
• • •
Genny is good at everything in school—math, reading, science, spelling, civics. She skips third grade.
She’s advancing quickly on piano. She practices every day before and after school. She plays in a recital and earns a bust of Schumann. It looks like marble, but it’s made of salt. Her mother starts a music scrapbook, and frames Genny’s achievement certificate to put on the wall.
Genny’s favorite aunt is Jillie, the youngest one, who never married and is always helping her parents and siblings. In Genny’s baby book, it says Genny’s first smile was for Aunt Jillie, who was living with them back then and doing the cooking and cleaning. It says Genny’s first complete sentence was, “Poor Mama tired!”
For Christmas when Genny is nine, Aunt Jillie sends her a dress for Shirley, one of her dolls. She draws a picture of Shirley in her new dress and sends it to Aunt Jillie. Aunt Jillie writes that her cat had four kittens, and Genny writes that she hopes the kittens will still be little when she visits in the summer.
She earns a bust of Handel.
She earns a bust of Bach.
One of her certificates has a mistake on it, so her mother gets right on the phone.
For Christmas when Genny is ten her father builds her a marionette stage. She has Snow White and three dwarves and Hansel and Gretel and a Prince and a Solicitor and a horse in pajamas.
In sixth grade she takes the test to join the School Patrol. They used to call them Patrol Boys, but now girls are allowed, too, and the girls wear the same uniform as the boys, white ducks and a white shirt and a white sailor cap and a white Sam Browne belt and a purple necktie. Genny looks like Butch, the ceramic sailor boy on the parlor mantelpiece. She stands on the corner of Lowell and 34th and crosses the children. The little ones are adorable.
There’s a patrol parade in May and she stands in her uniform in the back yard. Her father holds the camera. Face left, her mother says. No, my left. Put your left foot back so it looks like you’re marching. Bend your elbow like you’re swinging your arm. Stop being silly. Mother worked hard to wash everything and the smallest stain will show.
She wants a puppy.
* * *
• • •
Genny is twelve. On top of her piano Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky are all lined up.
It’s Mother’s Day. She gets up early and walks to the florist on Wisconsin Avenue to buy a dozen roses she’s saved for. She puts them in a vase and arranges them better than last year. She makes breakfast and brings it on a tray to her mother, who’s waiting upstairs pretending to be asleep.
“How sweet! Thank you, darling!”
She goes back down and brings up the roses and a card she made.
“How lovely! The card is precious!”
She dresses up and takes her mother to afternoon tea at a café in Friendship Heights. Other girls are there with their mothers, and there’s a little argument about how she’s dressed compared to the other girls, but it’s over quickly and they make up. Daddy takes them both out to dinner and afterward Genny gives her mother a locket, very nicely wrapped. There’s one more tiny argument in the evening about some backtalk Genny gave during dinner, Genny can’t even remember what started it. But the day ends like last year, her mother crying, “Other girls appreciate their mothers, I don’t understand . . .”
Daddy stands there looking useless.
* * *
• • •
Genny has written a marionette play and enlisted two other girls from school to help her. It’s called “There Will Always Be an England,” and the girls perform it at their junior high school to benefit Bundles for Britain. For the play, Hansel and Gretel stand in for two English schoolchildren, and Snow White is their plucky, inspiring teacher. The Solicitor is Churchill. The three dwarves are Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering. Genny wrote in a bit about delivering a message so they could use the horse, too. They sell thirty-five tickets and make five dollars. The following weekend they perform the play again, this time for free—which is called doing your part—for some servicemen at the Roads Service Club. The men give them a standing ovation. They receive a thank-you letter from the vice chairman of Bundles for Britain and they get their picture in the paper. The other girls are looking at the camera, whereas Genny—she always does this, why can’t she listen, how old is she now, when will she ever—is looking at Gretel, whom she is holding.
* * *
• • •
In the summer of 1942, while visiting the farm in Alabama, Gen gets a chance to ride a neighbor’s horse for five minutes around a dirt track while the neighbor walks along holding the bridle and her life is changed forever.
* * *
• • •
Her mother lets her have a Jack Russell terrier, no doubt in hopes it will distract her from horses. Gen loves Stubby fiercely. He has a doghouse in the back yard, but sleeps at night with her. (Arguments about that, which Gen won.) He’s squirmy and cuddly and lively and causes all sorts of mischief. He digs under the wire fence in the back yard. He skids and scrabbles around the house chasing balls. He waits by the parlor window for Gen to come home from school. He’s sad on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons when Daddy drives Gen to Pegasus Stables near Silver Spring where she takes riding lessons. (More arguments about that, which Gen also won.)
* * *
• • •
At her annual dentist checkup Gen learns she has eight new cavities. Her dentist says her enamel has been stripped away. He asks questions. Turns out it was all that hot lemon juice. While she’s at it, Gen mentions the strychnine and gets the reaction she wants. “I’m surprised it didn’t kill you,” the dentist says.
* * *
• • •
Imogen Brown, five foot five and fifteen years old, hot and dusty, fit and freckled, canters on Margie down the bridle path along Rock Creek, under Beach Drive Bridge, up the slope into a clearing bordering 16th Street and down again into the woods. It’s June 1944. She pounds across Riley Spring Bridge, veers left to continue downstream and opens out into a gallop. Jesus, it’s just so gloriously fun. Paths fork off into denser woods and steeper slopes, and Imogen knows them well, but today’s assignment is to time a direct route through the park all the way to the Tidal Basin.
Because . . . Meadowbrook Has Gone to War!
That’s a joke she shares with Fran and Dot. Imogen started riding lessons at a public stable, but from the beginning her mother had her beady eyes on Meadowbrook. If she couldn’t get her daughter off the brutes, she could at least get her into the equine version of a finishing school. Meadowbrook was where the ambassadors’ daughters boarded their horses, and it taught the pure English style. It hosted foxhunts. But it was full up, and Imogen, anyway, was too much a beginner. Then an influential matron of Meadowbrook had the heaven-sent idea of founding an equestrian chapter of the American Women’s Voluntary Services, which was aiding the war effort. Meadowbrook constructed additional stables and put out the call, and Imogen signed up so fast it made her mother’s head swim.
She barrels under another bridge, then slows Margie to a trot. The route is eleven miles; about half of it has to be trotted or she’ll exhaust the mare. She passes Miller Cabin on the other bank, then the picnic area for civilians, whom she’s sworn to protect.<
br />
Here, by the way, is how fine she looks: creased and worn leather boots, white canvas gaiters, denim jodhpurs, buttondown shirt with a navy blue tie tucked between second and third button, rakish Motor Transport cap. On her left shoulder is a blue diamond patch with a brown horse’s head, above which reads the banner, “A.W.V.S.” Imogen cut and sewed the patch and banner herself, following the regulation patterns in the training manual.
Now she passes the police lodge—greetings, fellow guardians!—and parallels Ross Drive. She can make out through the trees the hoods of cars, which on this sunny Saturday are backed up in traffic. She skims past them, up a small rise—at the top she sees a complete car, a little girl at the back window who flashes a startled wave—then back down. There’s a fallen branch toward the bottom, and Margie shortens up and scampers over it like a happy cat.
Here’s the idea: if Washington, DC, gets Blitzed or invaded and all communications are cut (lines down! telegraph operators held hostage!), the brave teenage horsegirls of the A.W.V.S. Junior Auxiliary Rock Creek Patrol will carry messages from temporary command centers in Maryland down through the park to the Lincoln Memorial, where crisp-saluting operatives will wait to further the missives (extracted from dusty leather satchels) on to bunkered leaders in the basements of the White House and the Capitol. Imogen and her fellow express riders are like the Norwegian children in Snow Treasure who sledded their country’s gold reserves past the Nazis. Who would suspect these youngsters of such grit and valor?
In other words, what a crock of shit! What a wonderful boondoggle!
On past Peirce Mill and the National Zoo, the stolid backs of embassies, down to where the park gets narrow, Margie tiring, now entirely trotting, and finally out along the shore of the basin—fresh breeze off the water, bright clouds in blue sky—around Easby’s Point toward the Memorial. She reaches the designated handoff marker—a stick pounded into the grass with a red ribbon tied to it—no real operative in sight, of course, just stern Mrs. Brody in her wool suit and overseas cap, who nods to her while recording the time—68 minutes—then communes longer and more tenderly with Margie.
