Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “Dr. Cross?”

  Elwin looked up. A tall narrow man, roughly his own age with a rectangular gray band of a mustache and shaky blue eyes, was leaning toward him with his hand extended. “Rick Carrollton, from Columbia,” he said. “They said they’d put us together on the flight out. I’m there in the, uh, middle.”

  “Of course,” Elwin said. (Carrollton? Columbia? He drew a blank. The middle! Yet another prayer spurned.)

  “So pleased to meet you,” said Carrollton, as Elwin, in 13A, was unsuccessfully attempting to reduce his spillover presence in 13B by tilting his buttocks toward the window. “I’m a big admirer of your work with linear optimality theory.”

  Emptily, Elwin said, “Oh, why thank you,” at the same time chiding himself for neglecting the information packets which would have supplied him the material for a polite retort. As a younger, more ambitious (and skinnier, more married) man, he’d have digested the whole packet weeks beforehand, thereby equipping himself with bouquets of flattery to distribute to his colleagues. But that’s what flights were for, he’d decided this time—cramming. The open Haynes manual on the seatback tray, he realized, suggested a slackness even deeper than he wished to admit.

  “And I see you’re a mechanic as well,” Carrollton said, with a chin-nod toward the manual.

  “Amateur.”

  “Boy oh boy, I don’t think I’ve cracked the hood of a car in twenty, thirty years. Used to love it as a kid though. My old man had a ’68 Pontiac Tempest, you remember those?”

  Elwin didn’t, but nodded anyway. It was already clear he wouldn’t be reading anything on this flight.

  “We’d fiddle with that darn thing every weekend,” Carrollton went on, a honeyed tone of nostalgia seeping into his voice. “Safe to say that car was the love of my life back then. I’d drive it to school and pop the hood at lunchtime like everyone else, you know, stand there waiting to be complimented. Or wait for some girl to be impressed, but, jeez, I don’t remember that ever actually happening, right?” A chuckle and a head wag, aimed at his former self. “You got kids?”

  “No,” Elwin said.

  “I’ve got a boy in high school, he’s a senior now. I don’t think he could change the oil on his car at gunpoint.” At this he sighed and went silent, suggesting to Elwin that there might be other, more troubling incompetencies worth noting about his son. Then he snorted and said, “Heck, I don’t know that I could change my own oil anymore.” As if to buttress his point, Carrollton splayed out the fingers of both hands, obliging Elwin to appraise them along with their owner. They were unsmirched, soft-looking, Westchester County hands, like you’d see in an advertisement for a high-end wristwatch. “Don’t get much honest labor, these hands,” he said. “Good for flicking a mouse around, that’s about it.” Another chuckle and a head wag, aimed this time at his current self. “Ahhhhh,” he said, lowering his hands to rub his knees as if a bout of poly-cotton scuffing might restore their old integrity.

  In the long pause that followed—one of those unnerving in-flight lulls during which one is tempted to crack open a book or magazine but fears the rude signal it might send—Elwin found himself studying his own hands, remembering in passing the way his father’s hand had seemed so fragile and avian in comparison. His were soft-looking, too, but in a different, more upholstered way than Carrollton’s. Squishy, doughy-looking hands, with gnawed fingernails and cartoonish dimples. Good for grabbing a cheeseburger, that’s about it. He noted his gold wedding band, which had been resized so many times through the ever-swelling years that by now it was scarcely thicker than tinfoil. He hadn’t had the heart to abandon it yet, though by this time stubbornness was as much to blame as sentiment. He wasn’t sure if Maura had noticed it when she’d stopped by just before Christmas, but he hoped so. Maybe he’d wear it forever, like some sadsack from a George Jones ballad, and exact his posthumous revenge when Maura would spy it gleaming upon his refrigerated finger at his funeral and break into how-could-I-have-hurt-him-so sobs. Or, more likely, he’d finally wriggle it off his finger when Maura cut it out with all the “autonomy” crap and decided whether she was divorcing Elwin for the chef or coming back home. But then what would happen to it if she finally did pull the trigger? The question suddenly chilled him: What did people do with their wedding bands after a divorce? Tuck them away in rarely opened drawers, pawn them, sell them on eBay, have them melted down into tiny, bitter ingots? What happened to all those rings? And—what had Maura done with hers?

  Her pre-Christmas visit had been a pity stop, he knew that. She’d claimed she’d left some shoes in the closet, but since the closet offered up no shoes but his own, he suspected it was a ruse. Elwin had been on his way down to the garage to meet Christopher when the front door shivered with timid little knocks. He was dressed in his (amateur) mechanic’s uniform: oily Marasmus State t-shirt, jeans, a knit skullcap. He looked like a hobo, whereas Maura looked as if she’d made a detour on her way to the city for dinner; she was dressed for foie gras. He fixed her a cup of tea, and then, after deciding that the beer he was craving would only intensify the hobo impression, fixed a wan cup for himself. Their conversation was civil but stilted, like that of opposing generals forced to make small talk while their aides type up drafts of a surrender agreement. Aside from real estate, mostly they’d talked about his father: an easy neutral ground.

  “You’ll like this,” he said. “Dad says last week that he’s thinking about divorcing my mom. He’s upset that she never calls.”

  “Oh God,” she said, directing a tragic-looking smile into her teacup. Then she looked up frowning. “Why’d you say I’d like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Elwin said, cutting his eyes sideways. Because what he’d meant, semi-consciously anyway, was: You’d no doubt like the idea of divorcing a corpse. Abandoning a helpless being, blaming someone else for your own unhappiness.

  He said, “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Anyway, I told him I had plenty of advice to give him on that subject.” Wincing, he realized too late that he’d overemphasized the word “that”—had in fact almost growled it. He’d set the exposure setting all wrong; what was meant to be light, or half-light anyway, had instead come out terribly dark.

  He wasn’t alone in noticing. “You see, there you go, El,” Maura said with a sigh. “You don’t need the little jabs. Is that really what you want—a divorce? I know this has been—painful. Okay? I know.”

  Did she know? Here was a woman, the former-and-perhaps-yet-again Maura Crandall, who’d awakened him at 3:30 A.M. on a Tuesday to announce she’d been having an affair with one of her publicity clients, a chef with the appallingly daytime-soapy name of Fernando, and that after much “terrible” consideration—not to mention sixteen years of marriage—she was moving in with the chef. She wasn’t “leaving” Elwin, per se. She didn’t want a divorce, didn’t want to “lose” Elwin; no, what she wanted, more than anything else, was “autonomy.” Nothing is more lonely, she said, than living with the wrong person, but before Elwin could sink his chin all the way into his chest she said she didn’t think he was the wrong person—just “half the right person.” He was simply, she said, “not enough.” Just like that: short flat staccato sentences, rehearsed so many times that she’d worn the inflections off of them. And then she’d left, before Elwin had even grunted himself into a fully seated position on the bed. He’d always prized her directness, but—this was too much. Subsequent counseling sessions daubed in some context—a lukewarm array of resentments ranging from their childlessness (the fault of his clinically sluggish sperm) to his weight, from their nonexistent sex life to (startlingly) his habit of peeing while sitting down “like a girl,” and to all the cool calm academic success he’d enjoyed while she’d pinballed through careers as a political pollster, grants administrator, bookstore manager, interior design consultant, and finally restaurant publicist—and yet, context or no context, Elwin felt sure he’d never recove
r from the brutality of that announcement, that 3:30 A.M. pickaxe to his chest.

  He’d stared at Maura across the kitchen table. There she was, the woman he’d married seventeen years before, the woman to whom he’d dedicated the lion’s share of his decidedly non-leonine life: that same wheaty hair, same rectangular face and severe mouth, same droopy shoulders, and that same inscrutably flat expression so many people had misconstrued over the years as disapproving or uninterested or bored or dense but that Elwin knew stemmed from her insecurity, a diffidence so crippling that even her facial muscles were bound by it. Or was it her? In the later years of their marriage Elwin had noticed, not with dismay but with begrudging acceptance, his wife seeming to fade, both physically and mentally. Every birthday seemed to sap her of more and more color and more and more energy, until, at about the time they’d moved from L.A. to New Jersey, she seemed to have altogether lost her capacity for excitement, developed an immunity to exhilaration, taken on the demeanor of a washed-out watercolor. A natural condition of aging, he’d presumed, or maybe a vitamin deficiency. Yet in the past year something odd and disturbing had happened: her colors (eyes, skin, hair, even her clothes) had grown exotically vivid, her speech more electric, her gestures as dramatic as a silent-movie siren’s. She’d been colorized, remastered with Dolby surround sound, converted to 3D: had morphed into a Pixar version of her former Elwin-ized self. Even the way she was sipping her tea at his table—there was bona fide gusto there, as if this was her first-ever taste of Earl Grey and within minutes she’d be describing it with zealous detail in an exclamation-filled diary. Was this the result, Elwin wondered, of addition or subtraction? Meaning: adding Fernando . . . or subtracting Elwin?

  “So what do you want?” he finally asked her, when they’d waded through the small talk.

  She sighed, and ran a fingertip across the table in a circle. “That’s the problem, El. I think I want everything.”

  A long silence, before Elwin asked, “And where does that leave me?”

  She shook her head, and for the first time since that 3:30 A.M. soliloquy he saw a trace of moisture in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. She reached for his hand, but he drew back. “That’s the worst part,” she said. “Not knowing what you want. Or wanting what you can’t have. I don’t—I don’t know.”

  “So, wacky stuff, huh?” Carrollton was saying.

  Elwin startled, realizing he’d just drawn his hand back the way he’d done with Maura. He looked at Carrollton as if Carrollton himself had just tried to hold it. “I’m sorry?”

  “The Markers panel,” Carrollton said. “Gotta confess, I figured it was one of my postdocs pranking me when I got the call. But then that spiel . . .” he said, throwing up his hands to denote . . . well, Elwin wasn’t sure what. “Not every day an engineer gets thrown in with Byron Torrance, you know?”

  The engineer. Now it made sense, his deprecation of his hands: At some point, Elwin reckoned, he’d given up the blissfully hypnotic tinkering that had led him into engineering, swapped his calipers for class rosters. It’d been the same way for Elwin. At some point he’d gone from actually preserving languages to preserving his various centers for the preservation of languages, to the maintenance of his little sinecures. Of the world’s 6,500 languages, only 600 would survive another generation, and what was Dr. Elwin Cross Jr. doing about it? Eating dinner with potential donors to the Trueblood Center. Sitting still as a pimple through committee meetings. Checking his email. Resisting constant memo pressure from the Dean to “harness social media” to advance the “Trueblood mission.” (Now there was a concept, Elwin thought: using Twitter to stanch the red tide of language death. An idea on a par with arming a militia to combat gun violence.) Informing his father, over and over again, that he was a widower. Studying a diet book whose premise was that portion size, rather than a plague of sapped willpower or sedentariness or high fructose corn syrup or Happy Meals or anything else, was to blame for the fattening of America, and that one could achieve a healthy diet by eating only half of everything and dumping the rest in the trash. At what point, he wondered, had he been forced to devote all his energy, constitutional or not, to mere existence?

  As to Byron Torrance, the subject of what appeared to be starstruck elation from Carrollton, he was a semifamous genome biologist fond of making scientifically imprudent forecasts about the future of humanity. Armed with a Panglossian view and a whizcrack publicist, he regularly plopped himself onto studio couches to spin comforting predictions for basic-cable late-night talk-show hosts. Chief among his theories was that humans were extinction-proof, owing to their ability to manipulate flora and fauna, and that genetic engineering would temper the evolutionary perils of what he deemed an unavoidable (but not calamitous) human monoculture. More prudent scientists, whose books didn’t sell one one-thousandth as many copies as Torrance’s and whose media exposure was limited to alumni-magazine profiles, had already parlayed his name into a verb: to “Torrance” something was to proceed apace on the blithe assumption that everything will work out somehow. George W. Bush, for instance, had “Torranced” the war in Iraq. The mortgage industry, for instance, had “Torranced” the subprime loan market. Dr. Elwin Cross Jr., for instance, had possibly “Torranced” his marriage.

  “My first thought, of course,” said Carrollton, “is why the heck are we burying this stuff anyway? Well, maybe not my first thought . . . my daughter’s, actually. She said to me, ‘Why can’t we just shoot it all into the sun?’ Nineteen-year-olds, you know. They’re all such self-appointed geniuses.”

  Elwin glanced at the shape of Carrollton’s mouth to confirm the sneer he’d caught in his tone. Carrollton’s children appeared to be a source of acid displeasure, an engineering project gone wrong. “Interesting idea,” said Elwin.

  “Yeah, I did some reading on it. It’s an old idea, actually. Main problem is orbital velocity. Turns out it’s awfully hard to get anything to the sun. The better bet, apparently, would be to eject it from the solar system. Just give the stuff a one-way bus ticket, like Giuliani did with the homeless back in the nineties. But then you run into a statistical trap. As in, the one percent failure rate of rockets. Can’t risk a payload of radioactive waste blowing up over Yellowstone. Or Paris. Not to mention the costs involved. Astronomical, pun intended.”

  Elwin wasn’t quite ready for this discussion but began anyway, “Well, burial has proven—”

  Carrollton cut him off. “Frankly, I like my son’s idea the best. Since radioactive decay emits about two kilowatts of heat, my son (I loved this) says we should bury it underneath the interstates in thick steel containers. No more icy roads. Wouldn’t even need to salt ’em anymore.”

  It wasn’t clear whether Carrollton was making fun of his son’s proposal or endorsing it. When Elwin had explained to Christopher his whole warning-future-civilizations-about-buried-nuclear-waste mission, Christopher had cited the radioactive spider bite that’d transformed Peter Parker into Spiderman as a way of questioning the gravity of the whole enterprise. As if to say: Relax, Doc. Maybe there’s an upside to be considered, like super powers. Christopher was clearly a Torrancian. “You’ve got interesting kids,” Elwin offered.

  “Yeah,” said Carrollton, not in the least bit scrutably. “Anyway, that issue’s settled. What’s your angle here? I’m just the materials guy, as I understand it. You tell me what kind of marker you’re building, I tell you what to build it out of. Though, personally I’ve a theory that . . . well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be popular.”

  “Go on,” Elwin said, ignoring Carrollton’s question about his own angle since Carrollton appeared to be ignoring it too.

  “What? Oh, sure. So we’ve got a quarter-million barrels of radioactive waste buried in salt flats, two thousand feet below New Mexico. With a ten-thousand-year hazard period. And we’re supposed to devise a marker or marker system to keep people away from this stuff. But what do we know about the deep future? Not squat, right? Will the United States l
ast ten thousand more years? Inconceivable. Will civilization as we understand it last that long? Highly doubtful. But will humanity last ten thousand more years? Barring the unthinkable, something like a mega-meteor strike, it seems probable. Genetically modified, maybe, or cybernetically enhanced—whatever. Homo sapiens. So there’s your one constant. Human nature.”

  “I’m following,” said Elwin. (This whole spiel, he could tell, had been rehearsed as many times as Maura’s 3 A.M. declaration, not to mention his father’s recurrent questions. The bartender at McGuinn’s had probably called others “big cutie,” too, though he preferred to think otherwise.)

  “I got to thinking about this with regard to the pyramids,” Carrollton went on. “That’s one of my areas of research. Four or five years ago we did a microstructural analysis of the Khufu pyramid, figured out there was a geopolymer involved, like cast concrete, and not just cut limestone like everyone’d thought?” The interrogative way he said this suggested the expectation that Elwin might break in at any moment to say, “Of course! Holy shit, that was you?” Elwin didn’t. “Got some media notice on that one because it pushed the date of concrete development back by about twenty-five hundred years. Anyway . . .”

  “Human nature,” Elwin nudged.

  “Right. Well, I went to the pyramids. Thought-wise, I mean. I was thinking about them in terms of engineering, of course. Specifically, what lessons they might offer about protecting the message core of our marker system, whatever it’s going to be. From the elements, vandalism, intrusion, et cetera. But then something . . . something dawned on me. Khufu, right? The Great Pyramid? Khufu was looted by the time of the New Kingdom, let’s say 1500 B.C., but probably long before then. So it remained undisturbed for less than a thousand years. King Tut’s tomb, on the other hand, was safe for about thirty-two hundred years. A much better run, if you’re thinking about it in terms of intrusion prevention. So I asked myself what the difference was.”