The Future for Curious People

by Gregory Sherl

  And then for no reason I think of the weekend just last summer when they met Madge for the first time. They were wearing terry-cloth bathrobes, drinking cocktails by the pool. I was doing laps when my father said, “There’s a golf game on the mini-TV. Come watch.” But I said, “No, thank you,” and dipped down underwater. Madge was sitting on the pool’s edge. I could see her thick ankles, blurred by chlorinated pool water, kicking back and forth. I hate these little memories. Why do certain ones pop back up?

  And now I feel a little wheeze inside of my chest cavity—the inching in of a cold, pneumonia, something tubercular? Can the heart wheeze? I remind myself, as I’m slowing down, that I also have great memories of Madge—like how we met. It was in this little coffee shop. I was waiting for a blind date, drawing pastries in the margins of my notebook. Madge walked past me then doubled back and stopped in front of me. She said, “Vaginas?” and pointed to my pastries.

  “No. They’re pastries.”

  “Really, Freud? So you’re telling me that this little bit here is like a cherry? Look again.”

  Some did have cherries—and they were all clearly vaginas.

  “Vaginas in the margins,” Madge said. “I guess that would be vaginalia.”

  “Nope, they’re pastries,” I said, trying to stick it out. “This is obviously pastrianalia.”

  “You’re Godfrey,” she said then.

  “If I’m Godfrey, then you’re Madge.” And that was that.

  She tilted her head and sighed at me as if seeing a current failure of some kind but one with promise. And, in that moment, my pencil mid-clitoris, I don’t know if I fell in love with her, but I know I wanted her to take me on. I wanted to fulfill that promise. I loved the tilt of her head and her sigh and the fact that she called me on my bullshit. I needed Madge and that was the start of love. I think that’s how it sometimes goes.

  Home now. In front of the fourth floor walk-up I’ve been sharing with Madge for nearly six months. I raise my arms over my head. Coach used to suggest this for cramps. I bend over, stick my head between my knees. I try to count slowly to twenty-five, but I keep losing my place around twelve. I look up, directly at our fourth-floor window, but I only see blinds, blips of light peeking through. Why isn’t Madge looking for me? Is anyone thinking about me right now? If not, do I exist just a little less?

  A woman walks by pushing a stroller. She’s staring at my hands as if looking for what I might be holding. Just bulky mittens with mitten clips that are more appropriate for a four-year-old in the 1950s! I want to tell her. I nod politely, look into the stroller. The baby is so packed in that I can barely make out a face squinched up in the puffy drawstring hood. All babies are just pudge until they’re not. It’s a disturbed little face, so red and puffed it could be choking, but then the face twists and begins to wail. I flinch. My heart stutters. This is just the kind of thing that happens to all men before they propose, I tell myself. But then, for a moment, I’m sure I’m dying. This is it, I know, squeezing my eyes shut.

  A second later, I’m not dead. Fifteen seconds later, still not dead. My heart still beats. My lips still inch open to let air in. The moment passes. Another moment passes.

  “Why are you standing out in the cold?” It’s Madge’s loud voice, which carries like a soccer coach. She’s overhead. Her hair is blowing around her beautiful face; her whole upper body is sticking out the window. Some women’s breasts can remind you of the singular term bosom but not Madge’s. She has great breasts, ample and buoyant, and independent of each other.

  I’ve been expecting her, wishing for her, but I didn’t realize how not ready I was for the reality of her. This is going to be my wife. Wife! It’s disorienting.

  I look away at the gargoyles perched on the corners. One is stuck in an indiscreet position—is he scratching his balls or protecting them? You can never be too sure. The sky is a gusty gray. It snowed earlier and might snow again.

  “Godfrey!” Madge yells again.

  I’m stuck on the idea of proposing outside. It strikes me that I might pick Madge up and spin her around—if she says yes—that I might actually yawp. I look up and down the street, shout back, “I’m not sure why I’m out here still! Are you ready?”

  “I’ll be down!” She sighs. It’s a gusty sigh, the kind you give a child, and slams the window shut. Standing there in my mittens, I shift my weight from one foot to the other, feeling tall and galumphing. I’m on the tall side; nice Little League coaches told my parents that one day I’d grow into my body and become suddenly coordinated. That never happened.

  I shouldn’t have worn the mittens. I should feel more manly right now.

  But here’s something I love about Madge: she’s quick to get angry but also quick to get over it. When she appears on the stoop in her red coat, she’s over being annoyed with me, and she looks fantastic. She’s wearing frosty lipstick, as if she’s just kissed a cake. Madge is good to me. She really is. She once made homemade matzo ball soup for me when I was sick and she’s not even Jewish. She looked it up online.

  I want to yell out, Madge! I! Love! You! I am happy. There’s so much blood in my head, I’m top heavy. She walks up and kisses me on the mouth. Right there, full mouth. Her lips are warm. Her lips are a heater, and when I hug her, perfume gusts up from her coat. This has been my problem since I’ve started growing hair where there never used to be hair: I love women. I should stand in the middle of a group of men sitting in chairs shaped in a circle: My name is Godfrey and I love women. I’m completely susceptible to them. It’s a difficult way to go through life, constantly falling in love. I don’t wear love very well. And, because of my weaknesses, I’m dangerous. I have to keep myself in check, always. Madge helps keep me in check mainly because she’s enough. Madge is so full of life, so vigorously alive, that I’m rapt every time she walks into a room—or out of a building to meet me.

  “Why were you lurking?” Madge asks jokingly. “You shouldn’t lurk. People will think you’re a serial killer. Are we going to the sushi place? It’s my turn, you know.”

  And that’s how quickly it changes. Taking turns. This is my future. Life doled out simply: Madge’s turn. Then: my turn. Everything in this moment seems suddenly permanent. Everything in this moment is permanent.

  Fact: I hate sushi. Rolls too big for your mouth, but you don’t dare cut them with a fork. I don’t trust raw fish. Normally I might say, “I only eat sushi that’s well done.” Or I might say, “I’m not feeling suicidal enough for sushi today.” But this would encourage Madge to give me a speech on living life to the fullest, and I’m never in the mood for that, much less now, on the brink of such emotional risk. My hands feel too hot for the mittens, and now I’m thinking of the wallets I’ve lost and the girlfriends I’ve lost, too—Tina Whooten, Liz Chase, the Ellis twins. I look up at the buildings around us, hundreds of windows. How many women are in there? How many could I fall in love with? How many would let me fall in love with them? Am I choosing the right one? Does it mean something to even be thinking this?

  “Why are you just standing there, Godfrey?” I stop and look at Madge. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Jesus, I’m just standing here, looking at her like that. To be honest, I’m not really sure what that is. “I’m sorry,” I say, glancing at my shoes. How is it possible that my shoes look rumpled? If I were holding an ironing board, that would probably look rumpled, too. “You know,” I tell Madge, “if we ever had kids, they’d have a fifty percent chance of rumpledness.” I look back at Madge.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “You aren’t making a lot of sense. Are you drunk or something?”

  “I mean,” I say, “I’m sorry about not having a better job. I should have paid better attention in college, taken harder classes. You know, really hunkered down with something like premed.” Madge talked me out of being an elementary-school teacher, explaining how much money they make when they hit their salary ceiling.

  “Are you going to throw u
p? You look that same way you did on the subway that time.”

  “Just listen,” I say, trying not to raise my voice. “I’m not going to throw up.” Now that I say it, though, I’m not so sure. I feel shaky. I finally take off the mittens. They dangle on the strings. Slowly, I reach into my pocket. “Madge.” My chest tightens. I feel a fiery heat, a certain lightheadedness. “Look, I mean . . .” I manage to say. “Here.” I hand her the box.

  Madge opens the box and then shuts it. She’s smiling.

  “I was planning on picking you up and spinning you around.” I want to tell her, Sometimes I wish I could reverse time and start over, from the very beginning—my first wail. “I feel like passing out.” I sit on the stoop.

  “Godfrey,” she says, “listen.” She sits down next to me. “I think we should look into this. Go forward carefully.” She draws out the carefully, all three syllables. “You know?”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a yes, kind of. A slow, careful, looking-into-it yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Madge smiles and puts her arm around my shoulder like a fellow sailor. We are out at sea together, hunting our dinner: giant whales, kraken. Maybe we are in a submarine, sitting on tons and tons of nuclear warheads. Madge finally says, “I thought you’d say no. Funny, huh?”

  I am baffled. “Say no? To what exactly? I mean, I asked you.”

  “To looking into it first.”

  “Looking into what?”

  “Well, I don’t think we should use the same envisionist. It’s like sharing a therapist or something. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Dr. Plotnik and you should see Dr. Chin. I hear he’s very good at giving the total experience. I almost made appointments but decided I should at least wait until you asked first.”

  Madge hasn’t put on the ring. It’s still in the box. The box is pretty, but nothing should stay in the box. “You’re talking about envisionists?” There’s a billboard on the beltway: DR. CHIN’S ENVISIONING SERVICES. NOW OFFERING: THE FUTURE—FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE. At the bottom it says, “It’s easier to choose the future, when you’ve seen the options.” And that actor who does all that sci-fi stuff has started doing commercials for some conglomerate that offers discount rates. “No. No way.”

  “What? You just said yes!”

  “I didn’t know you meant going to envisionists!”

  “It’s actual science. You know that, right?” And then Madge napalms me with data. She’s got an incredible ability to memorize stuff. There’s nothing I can do but sit back and take it. “Each human being has vast untapped mental abilities. Our eyes take in some twelve million pieces of information every second while in that same second, our ears are processing one million pieces of information, touch is bringing in five hundred thousand data points per second, smell is only bringing in seventy bits of information and taste is only registering about fifteen info bits per second, but look, Godfrey, do you know how many pieces of sensory information that is per second?”

  “You know I don’t know,” I say. Does she think I’ve been running a mental calculator? Are we still even talking about marriage?

  “That’s approximately thirteen million five hundred thousand eighty-five pieces of sensory information per second. And those are just the senses alone. There’s also all the deep tissue of long-term memory and the chemical processing of short-term data and the processing of intangible information as each of these senses is synthesized to produce thought, action, reaction.”

  “That’s a lot of knowledge.” If I agree with her, maybe I can reroute the conversation back to marriage more quickly.

  “And then that Scandinavian researcher figured out that if we could process information without the interference of the subconscious’s absurdism and emotion—vengefulness, greed, hope, faith, hatred, and most of all love, which blurs everything we perceive”—she seems really annoyed by the blurriness caused by love—“and add that to what we know from the past, we could predict our own future outcomes, in minute detail.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, feeling a little like crying.

  “We know,” she says. “Our brains know so much more than we ever let them!”

  “I get it.” I barely get it.

  “The drug cocktail that Percel created puts the patient into a short kind of awake-REM state, cuts out the white noise of emotions, and allows the person to predict a specific potential future. And then, this is the best part, Godfrey. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I say, a little defensively.

  “This guy named Bacon figured out how to digitize that dreamlike state—capturing the synapses—for viewing. See how perfect it is? It’s a real tool, but it doesn’t come from out there, Godfrey.” She straightens her arms and waves her hands at the world. “It comes from in here.” She taps her forehead and then my forehead. “Each of us is brilliant, Godfrey. See? So don’t sell yourself short.”

  “I’m not selling myself short! I asked you to marry me. Remember?”

  “Look. This is my one request. Envisionists. It’s the only smart thing to do.”

  “If people can really tell the future, why do they muck around with people’s relationships? Call the next Super Bowl! Put a fix on the stock market!”

  “Godfrey, envisioning is overseen by the FCC. Do you really think that they’d let people broadcast futures that would infringe on commerce? There are tons of regulations.”

  “Really. The FCC.” I didn’t know this.

  “They only have the matchmaking software at this point, but they’re working on the regulatory issues around other futures, like career paths. They worry it might have unforeseen ramifications on the economy if everyone suddenly decides to ditch med school and go into investment banking for the cushy lifestyle.”

  “Right. Investment banking. I probably should have considered that more closely. And we need doctors, too. I mean, who will outfit the investment bankers with pacemakers when their tickers start to fail.”

  “Don’t be caustic.”

  “I’m not being caustic! Doctors are important! Pacemakers save lives!”

  “Well, it really worked out great for Bart and Amy! You can’t deny that. They both saw fantastic futures. Incredible. I mean, I don’t know how they come up with all that money. I told my parents and my father was like, wow, you should invite them to the cabin.” Madge’s parents own a ski-in, ski-out cabin in Colorado I’ve yet to be invited to.

  “Like I want to hear about Bart and Amy right now.” I’ve already heard all of this from Bart. Their future entails tennis whites and healthy grandchildren, plus a thick head of white hair for Bart. Before I met Madge, Bart met Amy and now my Bart is gone. I love Bart and I always will, but sometimes I worry he’s turned into a gossip who sometimes wears various kinds of facial hair—with irony. I shake my head. “I proposed to you. Doesn’t that mean something?”

  “Don’t get all heated up,” Madge says.

  “Don’t get all heated up?” I squeeze my head with both hands. “I asked you to marry me, and you want to look into it first? Look into it first?” Everything’s sinking in.

  “You’re the one with a father who isn’t your biological father because your biological father was a married man at the time he and your mom—”

  “I don’t want to drag Mart Thigpen into this.” This is no secret. At age eleven, my mother sat me down and told me that my real father was not Aldo Burkes, the father I’d known all my life, but this other man named Mart Thigpen. A married man. A married man who was a connoisseur of thighs, who had sex with many women, including my mother, but always went back to his wife, which meant he left my mother high and dry! “High and dry, Godfrey!” she said, and I imagined her on a hill in the desert in a boat. She warned me that I was doomed to become a man like Mart Thigpen—a man I’ve never met. I’m his son, his animal son, and that I had to fight against it.

  My mother now rescues bunnies that people drop off at animal shelters. She has a yard full of hutches hand built by
the Amish. Her saving once-loved pet bunnies that have been abandoned is an obvious metaphor for Gloria Burkes saving Gloria Burkeses.

  “You bring up your dark fear of your animal nature all the time!” Madge says.

  This is true, if overstated a little. I do have this fear that I might become an alcoholic who might even do cocaine in a public restroom, which is one small detail that my mother told me about Mart Thigpen. Lord God, how many years did I have a fear of public restrooms because of my weak predilection for cocaine? How many months did I spend as a sophomore in high school, practicing rolling single dollar bills my mom gave me for morning milk into sniffable straws because I figured I should prepare for the inevitable! “Is that why you’re afraid to say yes? Because you’re afraid of what I might become?”

  Madge smiles. “Oh, Godfrey. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not afraid that you’re going to turn into a wildly lustful seducer of women? You’re no animal. You’re no Mart Thigpen.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I know Madge is mocking me, but truth is, I can trust Madge’s opinion which is important because I can’t trust my own—half Thigpen that I am. “This is about you and me. Marriage is a leap of faith. Don’t you believe in leaps of faith?” I ask.

  Madge shakes her head. “I love you. You know that.”

  “And I love you, too, Madge.” Here are more things I love about Madge: the way she talks with her hands as if carving air and laughs so hard she snorts and believes in helping others hence her job at the downtown clinic and how she knows all the lyrics to the Kinks and talked me out of a bad tattoo.