The Great Perhaps: A Novel

by Joe Meno

  TODAY THE ZOO has not been much fun. As Jonathan is backing the Volvo out of its spot at a parking meter, Madeline is staring out the passenger window again, fiddling with her hairpin. She looks dreamy, as lovely as the day they first met. In the backseat, Amelia is complaining that the air conditioner is too cold and Thisbe is asking if they can please never go to the zoo again. Jonathan turns up the stereo, and it is another Beatles song. One of the girls immediately begins to complain about it. The Volvo pulls into traffic.

  As the enormous brownstones of Lincoln Park rush past, only a flash of gabled history and fading light, a gigantic white SUV cruises around a double-parked car, swerving onto the wrong side of the street, speeding head-on toward the Volvo. At that moment, Jonathan stares at the blur of the SUV—small globes of sunlight flickering from the sky, the white sport utility vehicle rising inevitably before him—and then his brain promptly names it, though incorrectly: a cloud. As soon as he thinks he understands what he is seeing, he immediately begins to feel very strange, his heart beating terrifically loud, and then he knows it—he is having a seizure. His left arm feels stiff, then his right, then he is having a hard time breathing. His heart begins pounding even louder. His arms feel lifeless and heavy. He cannot hold on to the steering wheel. As the Volvo collides with the SUV, Jonathan tries to say something, to cry out or shout, but all he can do is whisper. Metal meets metal amid the sound of cracking glass. Thisbe screams in the backseat. Jonathan hits the brakes, then the gas, then the brakes again. His ears begin to ring, then everything goes silent. The Volvo is no longer moving. The family is completely quiet and then Madeline is turning around and asking if everyone is okay. Everyone says yes. Everyone except Jonathan. Jonathan opens his blue eyes, feeling his vision losing its focus, the world going hazy, an enormous cloud rising there before him. He begins to tremble and then he begins to convulse. Madeline is holding his hand, trying to keep him still, saying, Oh, God, don’t do this to me, Jonathan. Oh, God, don’t do this to me, and suddenly everything becomes bright and lovely

  the prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. Phylum: MOLLUSCA, Class: CEPHALOPODA, Subclass: COLEOIDEA, Order: VAMPYROMORPHA, Suborder: MESOTEUTHINA, Family: KELAENIDAE, Genus: TUSOTEUTHIS, Species: LONGA. The particular history of the prehistoric giant squid is largely misunderstood. With the incredible dearth of genetic material for evidence, much is still unknown, as the chitinous gladius, or, more commonly, the pen, is rarely discovered intact. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water. The prehistoric giant squid jets quietly through the dark gray water

  OUT OF THE CORNER of his eye, Jonathan looks up at his wife. He has been staring at her soft face for some time. He tries to smile, holding her hand. A bothered-looking paramedic with a blond mustache is taking his pulse. His daughters sit on the curb, holding each other, staring at him, terrified. Jonathan is sitting up, trying to think of something funny to say, but his head hurts very badly. His wife’s eyes are red. There are black smudges of makeup beneath her eyelashes. “I’m okay,” Jonathan finally whispers. “I’m okay,” but his wife does not stop crying.

  THE FAMILY DOES NOT go to the hospital. Jonathan says he is all right and refuses to get in the ambulance. He is more embarrassed than hurt, his face red with humiliation, shaded by his blond beard. When they pull into their garage, Madeline puts the Volvo in park and says, “Girls, I need to talk to your father alone for a minute.” Amelia and Thisbe are uncharacteristically obedient, scared to death maybe, and hurry out, slamming the car doors behind them. Jonathan, anticipating an argument, grabs his wife’s hand, trying to smile widely, trying to let her know that there is no need to worry, that everything is all right, but Madeline will not look him in the eye. Instead she stares straight ahead, still holding the steering wheel.

  “I want to know the truth.” She turns and looks at him, unsmiling, her eyes still red from crying.

  “About what?” he answers quietly, the words stiff on his tongue.

  “Did you take your medicine today or not?” she asks.

  Jonathan must first think how to answer. He looks away, the words coming very slowly.

  “Did you take it or not, Jonathan?”

  “No, but, honey, it was a simple mistake. I was busy this morning looking at some data from Japan—”

  “When was the last time you took it?”

  Jonathan stutters, then murmurs, “I don’t know. Two days ago, I think. I’ve been wrapped up in these sonar reports and…”

  Madeline quickly looks away. Jonathan tries to take her hand, but she is unmoving.

  “I was fine all day,” he says. “It was just an accident…it could have happened—”

  “You have no idea…no idea how it feels. You didn’t have to call the ambulance, Jonathan. You didn’t have to see the look on Thisbe’s face. You promised me this would never happen again. You promised me.”

  “I only need to go to Martin and try some other pills. I’ve been taking those other ones for too long, I think.”

  “You promised me, Jonathan, you promised me.”

  “Honey. I—”

  “I won’t do this anymore,” she says. “I can’t.”

  “It was only—”

  “I don’t…I don’t have anything else to say to you right now,” Madeline whispers and hurries out of the car. Jonathan sits there, in the passenger seat, in the dark of his garage, holding his face in his hands.

  “Damn,” he mutters. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  THE ARGUMENT IS NOT resolved, will not be resolved, by the time Madeline goes to bed. Jonathan stands beside her in the dark, trying to summon some words, an apology, something appropriate, but all he can do is mutter her name. “Madeline,” he says. “Madeline?”

  Madeline does not answer him. She is a white pile of pillows and blankets. He nods, after some time, then grabs his pillow and the spare sheets from the closet and quietly steps down the hallway to the cramped, disorganized den—papers and maps and charts left scattered about the room. Laying the sheet over the cluttered sofa, Jonathan closes his eyes, listening to the empty sounds of the house settling around him—the drip of the kitchen faucet, the wind whining against the windows, the dishes settling in the sink. He lies there for a long time, holding his breath, waiting for the echo of Madeline as she tiptoes down the hall, for the sound of her bare feet against the tile, for the shaky warmth of her voice, for the touch of her kiss upon his forehead, but, for some reason, it does not come.

  Two

  A. Madeline Casper, age forty-five, does not like the way the world is going. She does not like the way things are at the moment—with Jonathan, with Amelia and Thisbe, with her ongoing dominance study at the research laboratory. Unlike her husband, unlike her two daughters, Madeline is not afraid of being direct. She is not afraid to admit that there are things she doesn’t understand. She sits behind the vinyl steering wheel of the Volvo the next morning, wondering what is wrong with the world, listening to NPR, waiting for her two daughters to stumble into the backseat already unhappy, already bickering.

  B. Madeline looks up quickly and sees a cloud, shaped like a figure, standing in the treetops, as she glances from behind the Volvo’s windshield. Madeline glimpses at the oak tree beside the gray garage and sees something moving in the empty air. There is something quietly shifting. She squints upward and sees it, hanging in the open space just above the garage’s flat roof, in the tentative morning light: it is in the shape of a man—arms, legs, head, hands, feet, but made of clouds, no face, no expression, just the shape—he is drifting above the treetops, as if he is stepping from the highest branch directly into the air. Madeline holds her
hand above her eyes and sees the cloud is life-sized, the size of a person. It is slowly moving, expanding, somehow changing, like a blossom opening in place. Madeline stares up at it, her mouth open, as Amelia and Thisbe come hurrying from the house, the back door slamming behind them, the older sister referring to her younger sister as “an absolute savage.”

  C. Madeline does not know if either of her daughters notices the cloud. She keeps glancing in the rearview mirror at Amelia and Thisbe; Amelia has her headphones on and is adjusting her beret, staring at her own reflection in the window, and Thisbe has her eyes closed, trying to fall back asleep. Madeline looks through the dirty windshield as the cloud steps slowly from branch to branch. Then it is gone, hidden by the dark leaves, disappearing, one weird, early morning daydream. Madeline places the car into drive and the Volvo speeds away down the street.

  D. Madeline drives her girls to school as often as she can because she wants to. Though they usually prefer to walk, since their high school is only a few blocks away—part of the University of Chicago’s campus—Madeline likes to drive them, wishing them both a good day. Their neighborhood—shady, tree-lined streets, quaint-looking faculty homes, antique apartment buildings, collegial facilities of brick and mortar, modern-looking student housing of steel and glass—is really only a rectangle of a few blocks, extending from Fifty-first Street to Fifty-ninth Street, from the lake to Cottage Grove Avenue. Beyond the rectangle, everything is run-down, depressed, a blight of black-populated subsidized housing—dollar stores with cracked windows, ubiquitous liquor ads, an El train station that looks heartsick, trash-filled street corners, and sad, windowless buildings. Guiding the Volvo down the street, glancing over her shoulder at her two daughters, speeding toward the girls’ school, Madeline considers this—how the university happens to have one of the largest private police forces anywhere in the world, how a venerable institution of thought, of higher learning, peopled with some of the most intelligent, most privileged young students in the world, could exist, blindly, in the heart of one of the poorest parts of the city. What lesson are these young college students learning, or Amelia or Thisbe, for that matter? Before the question can be answered, Madeline is at the corner and her girls are hurrying out, slamming the doors closed, neither one of them mumbling a goodbye or even a thanks. She wonders if she and Jonathan have messed them up by talking to them like adults, by always being honest, by not letting them watch more television. She stares at them as they cross the sidewalk, hurrying into school, both of them now nearly as tall as she is.

  E. Madeline always feels like something terrible is about to happen. Driving down Lake Shore Drive, she always takes the slow lane, the right lane. She puts on a CD by Bob Dylan or the Beatles and sings along. When the traffic is lousy, she will turn and sing to the people in the cars around her. Today she is listening to NPR. “A Washington Post story revealed a secret report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that blames setbacks in Iraq on a flawed war-planning process that limited the time spent preparing for post–Saddam Hussein operations. The report also shows that President Bush approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August 2002, eight months before the first bomb was dropped and six months before he asked the U.N. Security Council for a war mandate that he never received.” Madeline passes car after car, stalled in traffic, staring at their bumper stickers, many of them touting BUSH⁄ CHENEY ’04. The Volvo exits the expressway, then speeds down Roosevelt, passing several newly constructed townhomes and high-rises, many with Bush/Cheney signs positioned in their windows. Seeing them, she sneers, shaking her head. She turns down a grim-looking side street and then parks in front of the enormous rectangular research facility.

  F. At work, Madeline does not know what to think when she finds three more pigeons murdered in her experimental coop. She is even more disturbed to discover that the three dead birds are all female. She shoos the rest of the pigeons toward the back of their enclosure to further inspect the dead animals. They have been pecked to death, their throats slit by the reptilian claws of some other pigeon. She turns and stares at the rest of the birds scurrying about the wire cage.

  G. Madeline does not know why, but she is fascinated by the hierarchy of dominance among these birds. In a very real way, they are a miniature version of the human world, complete with males and females that mate for life, a kind of ruling class, and now, unfortunately, murder. Her experiment with the pigeons is pretty simple, really: she has closely studied their social interactions, and has noted the rank of each male bird within the dominance hierarchy. In her notebook, Madeline has assigned the color red for the dominant males. After observing their social interactions for nearly a month, she has determined that there are three males of this strata and each has been banded with a red plastic cuff along its left leg. These dominant males, marked by the red plastic bands, are easy to distinguish: puffing up their chests as she opens the cage door each morning, bullying the other birds out of their way when it comes time to be fed. Madeline, quite unscientifically, thinks of these birds as smug little right-wing assholes, ruling the rest of the coop with physical intimidation, cruelty, and terror. These dominant birds, she hates to admit, demonstrate the worst aspects of human nature: loud, obnoxious, selfish, violent, needy, with an overpowering sense of entitlement.

  To better understand the hierarchy of dominance, these three dominant males have been removed from the experimental coop, and are now being kept in their own separate cage, which is what makes the discovery of the dead females so puzzling. Staring at the rest of the birds in the experiment, the beta males, tagged yellow, and the females, tagged green, she wonders how this tragedy might have happened. Did she mislabel one of the males? Did one of the other females, having temporarily lost its mate, react in some radically barbaric way? With the most dominant birds in isolation, why were these three female pigeons murdered?

  H. Before Madeline disposes of the three dead females, she makes another terrible discovery. They have been raped. Hurrying back to the indoor lab, she places the remains of one of the victims in a tray and inspects its cloaca, the opening through which waste and sexual fluids pass. The fleshy gland is irritated. She prepares a slide for the microscope, which reveals the presence of sperm. She checks each of the three birds and is saddened to discover all three of the dead females have been inseminated with the reproductive fluid of one or more male pigeons. Madeline does not tell anyone about what she has found. She is humiliated by the distressing results of her experiment and decides she needs to find out what is happening first.

  I. Madeline does not like to think of herself as a bad researcher, but she is afraid she is. She has begun to treat her subjects anthropomorphically, which is a serious mistake. There is one female pigeon, tag-numbered 26, from Group B, with a striking purplish white coat of downy white feathers, that Madeline has, against all scientific and ethical norms, named Lucy. She has begun to remove Lucy from the coop at odd intervals, and, holding the frightened animal against her chest, she has started singing to it, usually random, nondescript songs, though lately she finds they have been all nursery rhymes. It does not take much of a researcher to figure out what is going on there, she thinks. She does not feel like she is doing much good as a mother. She does not feel like she is doing much good as a scientist either.

  J. Madeline does not like to think about it, but she has been smoking cigarettes with Laura, an intern, and Eric, another researcher, almost every day on their lunch break. Together, they climb into Laura’s awful Ford Escort, then secretly, surreptitiously, they all light up. Madeline is ashamed she has started smoking again but feels this may be the only way to get through her day. Today, sitting in the backseat, Eric, his large glasses shiny with the afternoon sun, lights Madeline’s cigarette, touching her hand so softly. When her fingers meet his, she smiles, brushing the hair from her eyes, but he does not let go of her hand. She looks at him and immediately feels a jolt of panic, smiling wider now, nervous. He is staring deeply into her eyes and with his flickeri
ng irises he is saying: In our minds, we are making incredible love together. Come be with me in my mind. We can be together. In our minds. Madeline is still smiling, shaking her head, and he has now let go of her hand. Laura, in the driver’s seat, is completely unaware of what is happening, the Kinks playing loudly on the stereo. Madeline decides not to look Eric’s way again, not ever, because her heart is beating so quickly and somewhere between her thighs, something has begun to ache pleasantly.

  K. Madeline does not like the way her husband has been kissing her. It is like he is afraid, like he thinks she is made out of brittle bone, like she is a fossil, like he is trying to preserve her for an exhibit of some kind. She wishes he would kiss her like he used to. With total, ridiculous abandon. Like he still had something to prove.