Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  The Reversalists felt this to be true, and so they set about proving it. They would find, in the undowny bufflehead, a science to match their sentiments.

  They wanted to send the brothers back immediately. To deport them. And this was when Remy St. Gilles suggested the nonmillennial policy. Everything that was wrong with out there, St. Gilles said, was because of millennials. Millennials had been trolling him about his books for years, demanding faster publications and e-books and generally ruining his career. Millennials didn’t take anything seriously.

  Like your old asses aren’t the ones who fucked everything up in the first place, Jim said.

  Like you all weren’t smoking cigarettes and building SUVs and making bubble after bubble and destroying the world economy, Mick said.

  Like you guys aren’t the ones who clearcut forests and removed mountaintops and drilled and drilled, Jim said.

  Literature, St. Gilles said. Who killed literature?

  But it wasn’t only St. Gilles who wanted the millennials out.

  Gwen Manx, the reproductive scientist, called them a sexual threat. She wore baggy athletic shorts and a gray t-shirt with a picture of a horse on it and chainsmoked Virginia Slims. The way she looked at the boys with her arms crossed and her cigarette piping upward, they could not imagine they seemed very threatening to her but felt too timid to say so.

  Esther Stein, ever traumatized by her years as a teacher, wasn’t crazy about the idea of the brothers either and worried they’d be wild, possibly noisy. They’re going to want to install the internet, Esther said.

  It was only Ian who’d motioned they could stay.

  These boys have degrees from Penn and could be at Stanford right now. But they want to be here. They have experience with reverse engineering seed cultures. You’d be foolish to let them go. If you can’t stand these two members of the next generation, boys who came to you, who believe in what you believe, then who can you stand?

  St. Gilles had snorted at this.

  If we hate our own children, Ian continued, it’s no wonder everything is running backward. That is precisely the opposite of how things are supposed to work.

  Mitchell had been silent. They’re farmers, Dr. Grey. They’re no longer scientists and this is a community devoted to research.

  You’re not a researcher, Ian said. And no one spoke for a good long while after that. Because Mitchell took great pride in spearheading the “scientific” endeavors of the island. He proposed experiments and selected which papers might be sent out for publication and stopped by people’s shacks to offer feedback on their work. And they all let this happen and said nothing, though everyone knew, of course, that Mitchell was the wealthy son of a wealthy son of a real estate developer and hotelier, and everyone knew that he was a commune kid who’d never left the island except for a few lost years as a teenage junkie, but everyone also knew that Mitchell had a temper on him and didn’t appreciate it when people pointed out any of these facts.

  That’s right, Mitchell said finally. But I pay the bills.

  Everyone laughed tentatively.

  Unless you can prove you have some research need specific to the undowny bufflehead that validates your residence here, gentlemen, you’ll have to go.

  They’ll be my research assistants, Ian said. I’m in need of help.

  And what exactly is it that you’re working on, Ian? Mitchell said. You skipped our past two performance-review meetings.

  My work is still in its early stages, Ian said. With the boys’ help, I’ll be able to report back to you quite soon, I’m sure.

  And so the boys moved in, and this was how they came to be indebted to Ian.

  It was Ian who suggested the nesting pod project. True buffleheads nested in holes made by flickers and woodpeckers up north, species that didn’t exist on the island. So when the original ducks had been imported to the island, they’d had to find alternative cavities for nesting. In the Reversalists’ time, the buffles had been found nesting in everything from dead oak cavities to suitcases, shipping boxes, soup pots, wardrobes, mail cubbies, empty ovens, and oversized decorative vases. They were scattered across the island, with no central nesting ground.

  It’s not exactly larval cages, Ian said, but maybe you could design them new nesting structures? In one concentrated area?

  The brothers began sketching. Work revived their enthusiasm, and soon they felt that nesting practices might be the key to the whole thing. Maybe it was because the ducks lived in these totally unnatural spaces that something was turning back their evolution. Mick and Jim had grown up in a New York City penthouse forty-five floors above the street, on a block where northern mockingbirds imitated car alarms and sirens, singing their ruined world back to the men who had built it.

  At their first all-island meeting, the brothers presented their sketches to the others. It was a series of geodesic domes made of lumber and canvas, fusing the designs of two larval cage structures. Pods for the ducks to nest in.

  Jim said, If you live in an apartment complex long enough, you don’t even feel like a person anymore, because you never really have to interact with the natural world or see anyone. You don’t have to work together with people.

  You don’t commune, Mick said.

  Mitchell said, Do you really want to talk to me about communes?

  But the sketches were good, and no one could deny the buffles needed a better nesting ground. So the brothers were given funding for supplies and started building the pods.

  In the same spirit, the brothers were also the ones who started farming in the Lobby. They called it the Hippie Reeducation Program. They taught the generation who had gone to Woodstock and believed in the hypothetical recycling of materials and the practical smoking of weed how to compost with earthworms. How to indoor-irrigate. How to grow tomatoes upside down in hanging baskets that saved space. They turned the Lobby into a greenhouse full of plants grown from colonial-era seeds.

  None of this is particularly revolutionary, the older Reversalists said.

  That’s exactly what’s wrong with all of you, the brothers said. You only ever wanted to fix problems in ways that felt exciting. You thought you could make the world a better place by talking about it. Fucking about it. Marching about it. You need to learn how to do shit, they said. Then you need to work your asses off. Then you need to get a dozen other people to do the same. That’s the only shot we’ve got.

  We don’t have any shot, the Reversalists said. The Earth is kaput.

  That’s easy for you to say, the brothers said. You’ll be dead soon.

  You’ll be dead too, by the time it gets really bad.

  Maybe it’s not us we’re worried about, the brothers said. Have you thought about that? The people who are coming next?

  The Reversalists tossed their hands up, as if these unborn people couldn’t possibly be worth the trouble. They grumbled. But they ate the brothers’ produce. And it was good.

  * * *

  ——————·

  It’s like they didn’t even realize they were living on a commune, Jim said.

  There’s a real dearth of communing going on, Mick said. It’s like, they’re bad at the things they invented and then they’re mad when we’re better at them too.

  He really said that? Elsa said. About children?

  The thought of Ian saying the word children, speaking passionately about kids, felt far removed from the man she knew. Probably she and Nolan were no more who Ian had so vigorously defended than the other million kids born in their generation. But even so.

  Yeah, he was really passionate about not shitting on the next generation and all that. He kind of adopted us, Jim said.

  Don’t say that, said Nolan.

  It doesn’t feel good to be replaced, does it Nolan? Elsa said.

  Jinx was at Nolan’s feet and rolled over with her legs
bent in the air, offering her belly to be scratched.

  Did you help our father with banding at all? Nolan asked. Do you know anything about Duck Twelve?

  Duck Twelve, the brothers said. They caught each other’s eyes and laughed. He’s a trip. Your father was really into him. But it’s hard to predict where Duck Twelve will be. Doesn’t think like the other ducks.

  Jim stood up, and the feathers he’d laid on the table blew out of pattern. He went over to the bed and lifted the mattress. He pulled a blue waterproof logbook and a green waterproof field journal out from where they’d been hidden.

  These are all the places we went on count days, Jim said. He flipped to the later pages. And here you can see which ducks we sighted those days. This is what we came for.

  Why was he keeping them under there? Elsa asked.

  Mick said, You know Mitchell has already been through here looking for this, right?

  And he didn’t think to look under the mattress? Elsa said.

  Only teenagers with TVs know to hide things under mattresses, Jim said. Mitchell was a Leap-Backer. Commune kids. Different kinds of secrets.

  What exactly was our father looking for? Nolan asked. Do you know?

  He was tracking factors that influenced the ducks’ lives, Mick said.

  The children tried to follow what the brothers told them:

  Imagine ducks with anatomy and physiognomy so complicated that the majority of their caloric energy was devoted to maintaining and developing said bodies. Then, a mutation. The waterproofing was the most obvious change, the origin of the undowny, but there were others. The sum effect of which was that the undowny bufflehead was a duck simplifying its physiological structures, internal and external. Over the past ten generations, the average UBH voluntarily consumed 8 percent fewer calories, an astronomical amount, but maintained the same level of general health and fecundity. Their simplified bodies required fewer calories, which in turn meant the duck spent less time tracking down food, which in turn meant they were able to spend more time on other endeavors.

  Endeavors? Nolan asked. What else does a duck have to do?

  Your father seemed to think they were meditating, Jim said.

  Meditating?

  While they’re drying themselves in the sun.

  That’s insane, said Nolan.

  And isn’t it a time suck? Elsa said. The opposite of becoming more efficient?

  Jim shook his head. He wasn’t saying their lives were more efficient. Almost the opposite. He was saying that their bodies were more efficient so their lives could be less survival-oriented. He was working to show the beneficial impact of the shifts in bufflehead physiognomy for the population as a whole—not in measures of sheer population growth, but in the overall health of the next generation: life-span and less traditional variables that collectively amounted to what he called a superior “quality of life.” Essentially he was asking: Even if efficiency and survival are high, at what point is the “quality of a life” too low to validate existence?

  The Greys stared at the boys. Ian was a man who wore the same ratty workshirts day after day because they were perfectly fine. Who left a spoon balanced on the side of the sink all day so he would not have to use a second one later, despite their having dozens of spoons and a fully functional dishwasher. Ian was a man who never sat still to watch a movie because it was a waste to do only one thing at a time. Less efficient? Quality of life? It sounded impossible that this could be Ian.

  Nolan said, So he was just watching the ducks and thinking: they’re having a ball!

  It’s not that simple, Jim said. What he was looking for was something bigger—

  It sounds exactly that simple, Nolan said.

  Dude, don’t be stupid, Jim said.

  Don’t call him stupid, Elsa said, gesticulating and knocking several feathers off the table. Nolan felt gratitude well up in him. Stupid was what his parents had never said out loud but what he had always heard. That he wasn’t like them. That he was as unextraordinary as everybody else.

  Jim pressed the baggie of feathers into one of the books and handed both to Nolan. He said, He was the only one here who fought for us.

  Thanks for this, Nolan said, lifting a notebook. Nolan wanted them gone.

  Absolutely, Mick said. Small island and all that.

  Nolan showed the brothers out and noisily locked the door behind them. He resented being frightened because Elsa let strange men into the house, when they were in bed, undressed, and had no way of knowing whether it was safe. He hated how it felt to hear Mick and Jim talking about Ian, like they knew him.

  Because of course Ian would adopt boy geniuses. That Nolan had never resolved into such a thing, with parents like his, had been a mystery and a disappointment to everyone, not least of all Nolan himself. His childhood had been full of aptitude tests and advanced placement committees. He spent weekends with strange pencil-chewing women who took notes as Nolan failed to rotate 3-D objects in his mind. Nolan could not solve elaborate word puzzles or determine the number of snakes in cave Y. Nolan was unable to decipher the numeric patterns in endless Sudoku grids. Later, his parents thought there might be a psychological reason Nolan was not yet a genius and began taking him to psychologists instead. But in the Rorschach tests they gave him, Nolan saw only spilled ink.

  Elsa was sitting cross-legged on the bed. I really wish you hadn’t let them in like that, Nolan said. He sat next to her.

  They showed us the logbooks, Elsa said. You should be excited. Now you can research away. She tossed the books onto the floor a little too hard. The baggie inside poofed open and undowny feathers escaped in a burst. They floated slowly back to the floor, some of them traveling over the mattress, toward the children.

  Nolan snatched one out of the air. I can’t believe Dad spent time with those idiots. That doesn’t sound like him, does it?

  Elsa said, You didn’t pan out, he moved on; stop being surprised, Nolan.

  Nolan lay back on the bed. He breathed and counted his breaths. He counted to five.

  Actually, Elsa said, this is the first story that sounds like him at all. Dad giving up on a family, moving on, finding someone new. She flopped over backward next to him.

  Elsa, Nolan said, looking at her. Don’t. She was baiting him. It was easier to be angry than to be sad. Two small feathers had landed in her hair.

  You started it, Elsa said. She ducked and pressed her face against Nolan’s ribs. She bit him through his t-shirt. You’re the one who made us come out here, she said. You’re the one who wanted to open everything up again. She buried her face in his neck and bit him again, gently, on the neck. Less gently on the shoulder.

  Fuck, Elsa, stop.

  Elsa crouched and looked at him. You wanted this, she said.

  Nolan pushed her and she tumbled over onto the mattress.

  The years before you came were the only good years, Elsa said, sitting up.

  Nolan felt miserable and crazy. He sat up and pulled at his shorts. I know you thought I was the end of the world back then, but you can’t possibly believe it now, he said. It’s never me, he said. It’s never about me at all.

  Are you going to cry? Elsa said. Nolan—

  She reached for his hand, and he pushed her again. I’m not even enough of a person to be that bad, Nolan said, too loudly. I’m completely benign and insignificant. How could I possibly have been the one to ruin everything?

  Elsa hitched herself up. She straightened her tank top and rested her hands on her thighs. Okay, she said.

  Nolan sucked a breath in, too hard.

  Are you okay, New Baby? Elsa said. Besides Ian?

  I’m fine, Nolan said. I just meant— He rubbed his eyes.

  Why are we here, New Baby? We could try to call the postman. Maybe we should just go home.

  No, Nolan said.

&
nbsp; He didn’t know what he was playing at, and it was getting out of control. He’d dragged her to this island because he felt like everything they’d been through was unresolved and keeping him from being whoever he was supposed to be. Someone smart and good like Keiko. Someone worthy of his father. But all being here was doing was making him feel like a stupid teenage boy who wasn’t in control of anything. Who was going to let things get fucked up in exactly the same way all over again because he still didn’t know how to be a fucking person. There were feathers all over the mattress.

  Janine was always telling Nolan how wonderful he was. How much good he could do if he just thought about his job in the right way. He was connecting people around something they loved! And it didn’t have to be baseball and Twitter, Janine said. He could find another job. She was so enthusiastic. Upbeat. Nolan knew Janine expected him to be some kind of phenom, whatever he did, and when she said she loved him, he felt sick, as if he were somehow hiding from her that he was already over. A blown flower. Nolan wished he could return to a time before anyone had any expectations for him. Back when he was still becoming, his parents watching with rapt attention, waiting for him to unfurl into someone remarkable.

  Elsa poked him. You know that if Ian’s dead, we’re allowed to not be okay, right? When someone dies, it’s basically the one time when it’s completely acceptable to be awful and empty and not okay in any way.

  Sure, Nolan said. I know. He flopped back onto the bed and rolled over. Elsa gently squeezed his shoulder where she had bitten it. She tugged at his t-shirt collar so it pulled against his Adam’s apple, but he didn’t move. Nolan was so tired. He fell asleep with her tugging like that, with the lights on.

  * * *