The Future for Curious People

by Gregory Sherl

Madge rolls to her back. She opens her eyes. “I fell asleep,” she says, a little surprised.

  “I see that,” I say.

  And then without another word she rolls to her other side, away from the bathroom light, and falls back to sleep.

  By the time I climb into bed, I’m thinking about my five-for-the-price-of-three deal. I lost my virginity with Liz Chase who was good and wholesome—I dumped her for no apparent reason, except that maybe I decided it was hard to be around someone who was so much better than I was—the constant reminder of how very much I fall short. And there were the Ellis twins. We’d grown up in the same circles, though they were both a little wilder than my crowd, as if they goaded each other. I dated the less attractive one during summer break from college and then stair-stepped my way to the prettier one. It’s probably not surprising how much in the end they really hated me.

  In any of those futures, would I be quarantined in the basement to jerk off ? In any of those futures, would my mother still be alive? Couldn’t Liz Chase’s impeccable karma keep my mother—her mother-in-law—alive?

  I plump the pillows behind my head and I sniff the air. There’s a strange odor I can’t quite put my finger on—deathy? Does our bedroom smell like it’s suffered a small death? Can this be anything but a bad sign?

  That night I dream that my mother and I are at an indoor hotel swimming pool. She’s saying, “There’s an endless supply of towels here, Godfrey. Simply endless!” She seems younger and more radiant—moist with steam.

  I smile at her. “That’s good to hear,” I say. “It’s a great place.”

  She hands me towels, one after the other, until I’m weighted down with them. I walk to the pool’s edge. The pool is filled with people fully dressed in suits and dresses, an occasional ball gown.

  Then I see a woman who’s hard to place exactly. She’s wearing a bathing cap and a nose pinch. She’s pushing a kickboard through the crowded pool, her arms straight, her legs fluttering behind like a little motor. When she sees me, she stands in the shallow end, tucking her board under her arm. Then she makes a small gesture, like closing a book, and I know exactly who she is—the woman from Dr. Chin’s office.

  I instinctively tighten my knees against each other. “What are you doing here?” I ask, but the room is so echoey, she can’t hear me. She cups her ear and mouths, “What?”

  I repeat the question, but the words bounce and warble, like they’re stuck in the dead end of a maze. She shrugs and waves.

  I wave back.

  My mother shows up again, grabbing my shoulder. She points into the pool and says, “Look, look! How pretty!”

  And then I notice mice in the blue water, swishing beneath the surface in darting schools.

  I wake up in the middle of the night, sweaty and breathless. I sniff the air again and now I can place the deathy smell; it’s a mouse, dead in the walls somewhere.

  Evelyn

  DIRTY HARRY

  I spend much of the workday at the computer in Youth Services, looking up quotes from famous people about the future. But all I come across are quotes that I want to argue with.

  Steve Jobs saying, “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” I don’t trust dots to connect themselves, Steve; this is one of our many differences.

  And there’s B. F. Skinner who said, “I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.” Yeah, well maybe for an asshole who raised his daughter in a box.

  Lincoln said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” This is precisely one of the things I hate about the future. It plods toward us, loping along. I want to rush toward it, my arms flung wide, and I can.

  Once I’m worn out from arguing with dead people, I decide to hang with Dot at the circulation desk. We’re talking and zipping through the checkout line when I glimpse Adam Greenberg out of the corner of my eye. Dot catches my gaze. He’s walking toward us. His steps are careful, almost planned. Dot’s body tightens. I worry she’s forgotten how to breathe.

  “I love him,” Dot says. The words hang in front of her like a thought bubble in a comic strip.

  Adam Greenberg is Dot’s new crush. I’ve known him forever. He checks out Oprah’s Book Club selections for his mother, who is wheelchair bound. He’s new to Dot, though, brand new. Adam Greenberg, the sensitive boy with a sweater vest always glued to his thin but competent frame. Our Café Honeybun waitress, Delores, would approve. Nice nice nice.

  Dot makes a habit of disappearing in front of crushes. “Doesn’t he know that Oprah shut the book club down? That he’s going to run out of titles?” She’s sincerely concerned. “I’m going,” she tells me. “Tell me what he smells like today.” She starts pushing a cart of returned books away from the checkout desk, where she’ll spend twice as long as she should shelving them.

  I whisper, “I don’t want to sniff Adam Greenberg for you. Sniff him yourself ! Stay!”

  Adam Greenberg is moving toward us in his checkered vest, his ironed button-down mostly hidden beneath it, the colors mismatched just enough that they actually match (something neither Dot nor I can ever figure out), his green-framed glasses that look too much like they belong there, like he was born with them.

  And when Adam Greenberg is standing in front of me, I find Dot’s nerves running through me.

  “Evelyn,” Adam says, but he’s not looking at me. His gaze is following Dot until she turns down an aisle, disappearing from view. Adam turns back to me, gripping the Oprah-sealed book against his chest.

  “Hi, Adam!” I say.

  He slides the book across the counter and hands me his library card.

  I swipe the bar code. “Two weeks and counting with The Pilot’s Wife,” I say, suddenly aware that it sounds like I’m accusing him of a two-week affair with the wife of a pilot.

  “There are some new additions to the library,” he says. He puts his library card into his right front pocket and presses the book back against his chest. “I like the . . . aesthetics.”

  We both glance at the aisle that Dot disappeared down.

  I look at back at Adam and smile. “The aesthetics appreciate it,” I tell him.

  OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IS gusty in clumps of gust, and when I run down the front steps of the library, I feel a little giddy. I told Dot what Adam said about her, and she was uncharacteristically giddy, which I absorbed.

  And then I see a figure leaning over my bike, chained to the bike rack, messing with my basket. It’s a little foggy and so the person is ghostlike. Once I’m close enough to hear him cursing, I see that it’s Adrian. Two steps closer and I see he’s trying to tie a piece of paper to my basket with the wire of his ear buds.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask in a quiet voice.

  He pops up. “Shit! You scared me.” He presses one hand to his narrow chest.

  “I think you’re the creeper in this situation.”

  “I was passing by and I wanted to leave you a note.” The note dangles loosely, knotted by the black wires looped in bunny ears.

  A car lays on its horn nearby. People yell at each other out their windows. I pinch the paper and say, “Do you mind?”

  “It’s for you!” he says.

  The note is written on the back of a Babymakers advertisement. The first line is We should hang out. I’m not impressed. But then the next line is Bruce and Caroline miss you. And I know he’s trying to lure me in with his parents. I briefly remember their porch swing. It’s the kind of porch swing a kid could grow up reading books on. The third line is this: And I miss you. Seriously. Fuck. And that feels honest. I look up and Adrian looks a little teary. “It’s hard,” he says. “I love you and I
want that to be enough. I really, really feel like that should be enough.”

  “But you know we aren’t right for each other. We won’t last.”

  “I know, I know. We’re kind of doomed. I mean, I see how you’re not really the one for me and I’m not really the one for you, but we do love each other, right? In some way? And so we’re not wasting time. We’re doing something good.”

  A few skateboarders clatter by on the sidewalk. In retrospect, Adrian’s lack of composure when I broke up with him surprised and thrilled me at the same time. His fragility in public, a broad daylight of an emotion, like this little act of tenderness with the note and the ear buds, well, it’s something Adrian always masks with overconfidence in his band, but it’s important. It’s one of the reasons I fell for him.

  I say, “What if there is this time bomb to love. What if it’s like you fall in love with so many people who just aren’t right for you, and with each one, your heart toughens up, and you have to find the one who is right for you before your heart is completely calcified in your chest?”

  “Like there’s a closing window.”

  “Right.”

  Adrian shakes his head. “No. It’s more like every person you fall in love with is right for you but just not at this moment. Like the now-you would be perfect for the me ten years from now, but because we can’t sync it up, we’ll never make it. Unless you’re willing to wait for me to become that person.”

  “But my ten-years-from-now self can never be my now self, so I’d have to completely stop growing—deep down—so that we can sync up.”

  “It’s not that I’m stunted, though. I could have just as easily said that your ten-years-from-now self would be perfect for my now self.”

  “Right, right,” I say so quickly that he can’t really believe that I mean it, and I don’t really mean it.

  We wait for a whining ambulance to pass.

  “I’ve got to come by and pick up my stuff,” he says.

  “I’ve boxed it all up.”

  “None of this is going to go down well with me. I can tell that this conversation is going to piss me off in like T minus fifteen minutes.”

  I look around without moving my head because I wish someone were here to witness Adrian figuring this out about himself, his delayed emotional reactions to charged situations. If I say anything like this, though, he will realize—much later—that it was condescending of me and be even more pissed off.

  He opens his arms and we hug. It’s a muffled and muted hug because of our puffy coats, a good thing.

  He says, “Later.”

  I say, “Bye.”

  And then as I bend down to unlock my lock, I wonder this: In my newfound Time Bomb Theory of Heart Calcification, as I now name it, how much toughening of my heart did Adrian cause? How many small rejections, how many missed opportunities, how big of an accumulation of jadedness has taken its toll? I think of my heart. This isn’t its first hardening of a loss. How much is left?

  I RIDE THE FOURTEEN blocks from the library to Dr. Chin’s office quickly. I make record time. I’m stuffy hot under my coat.

  I walk into Dr. Chin’s office, still thinking about Adrian, the way he looked at me, a little teary-eyed through the fog. I worry about my heart. I feel this new urgency, but I’m hoping for something really good this time, if for no other reason than to prove that my heart isn’t so very calcified that I should start losing hope.

  The office is crowded: an old man wearing a tuxedo, a couple holding hands, a young man complaining about a bank loan scam. Desperation Friday, I figure—everyone trying to build some hope before the weekend. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” That’s Thoreau, of course. Am I still desperate, or has my desperation moved to the confirmed column? Damn it, I think I’m resigned.

  I don’t have an appointment, but I’ve come prepared with a mani-pedi coupon with which to bribe Lisa. When she slides open the office window, I say not a word. I just slide it across the counter. It’s a good one, 50 percent off. She looks at it, looks at me, and gives the nod.

  I don’t have to wait as long as I expect. Chin’s reading materials include Transworld Motocross and a Children’s Illustrated Bible. I’m about to choose one when my name is called.

  I’m led into examination room 5, where I’m handed a paper gown and told to change.

  Once I’m into the gown and am sitting in examination room 5, I realize I’ve blown through all of my envisioning appointments with nothing so much as a spark. I’ve thought about it—as Chin suggested—and decided on Godfrey. Godfrey Burkes. My first stranger. If I’m disappointed, at least it won’t feel predictable.

  Dr. Chin knocks twice before walking into the room. He sits next to me, rolls the tray holding the meds to the chair. We make small talk and then a pill, a sip of water. A second sip of water. Then one more sip of water until the paper cup is empty.

  “Who’s today’s victim?” Dr. Chin says.

  “Godfrey Burkes,” I say, surprisingly out of breath. “G-o-d-f—”

  “How do you know Godfrey?” he says, cutting me off.

  I can’t tell Dr. Chin I met him here in his office because I accidentally walked into the wrong examination room, and there he was in a paper gown. And there I was, staring at him in a paper gown. It was a staring thing.

  “We go way back.” He’ll immediately blacklist me if he knows I’ve moved on to strangers. Is that a worldwide ban? “We went to high school together. He was too quiet to ask me out, but I always wanted him to. Every day through our junior year. We had PE and Spanish together, but nothing. Then I transferred schools my senior year because my father got a promotion—he works in plastics, and we had to move, which meant a different high school. I never saw Godfrey again.” I’m a rambly liar.

  Dr. Chin looks at me for a full minute until he just sighs before typing Godfrey’s name into the computer. He hands me the panic button and gets out of the chair. “Fridays!” he says, exasperated. The door clicks behind him.

  EXCEPT FOR WHAT WE’RE wearing, everything looks as if it’s been shaded with pastels. It’s like we are two charcoal sketches placed in the middle of a cotton-candy land, standing in front of a pool the color of a strawberry milkshake, surrounded by edible plants and trees. But this is real life, and I don’t think real life will look like this in twelve years.

  Why does everything feel so tilted?

  On the screen, Godfrey is holding my hand. The thing most frustrating about envisionist sessions is that you can see the future in a decent amount of detail, but you can’t feel it. I grip the joystick harder, as if I’m holding his hand right back. We’re dressed in matching black—Godfrey in a well-fitted suit and skinny black tie, me in a black dress. Not a little black dress, something more somber. The matching heels are just tall enough to be considered heels. It’s not a sexy outfit, but I look well intentioned.

  Even with the sedative, I feel a surge of emotion something like nostalgia, but how can I feel nostalgic about a future? And Godfrey Burkes is just more present than anyone else I’ve ever seen in these envisionings. I can’t explain it except to say that he’s simply more there, and this frightens me a little.

  And then I see the bunnies! Too many to count. The meds make it impossible to try. They’re fast, and every single one is the color of clouds. They blanket most of the grass. Godfrey and future-me watch them scuttle around our feet, up and down the edges of the yard and pool. Where the fuck did all of the bunnies come from?

  The sky is the clearest ocean, like the future never met pollution and all the clouds became white bunnies.

  It’s deafening, the quiet. The camera zooms in. Godfrey and I are crying. I want Godfrey to say something. I want to hear his voice. I want him to tell me why we’re crying. I want his mouth pressed against my lips, and I want to know everything he’s ever thought. I want to learn it all slowly. I want the ridges of his teeth.

  I notice the flush of
my cheeks, the dimples in his. I’m smiling. Godfrey’s smiling. Still, we’re crying. Everything is so tilted. I feel completely alive and therefore vulnerable as if that’s what feeling fully alive demands; this scares me, too.

  I lift his hand and pull it to my heart and I feel his hand grip mine; I truly feel it! His fingers are colored, too, as if he’s been finger painting.

  He looks at me. I look at him.

  A bunny hops by and dives into a bush.

  But the tears. And the smiling. Is it the meds? A glitch in the system? Can too much of a good thing actually be too much of a good thing?

  Godfrey. Godfrey. Godfrey. I can’t take it. Are we so happy that we’re crying? I grip the joystick tighter. My heart holds an incredible amount of everything. How can one future be so full of emotions, different ones at once? I feel . . . whelmed and quickly overwhelmed.

  As if we’re on a timer, Godfrey and I take off our shoes.

  “On three?” Godfrey says. He looks at the pool.

  I can feel my heart pulse through my fingertips. I wasn’t supposed to have this session. Desperation Fridays. It’s too much. I wasted a mani-pedi coupon on this? I had to pay for this incredible eruption of feelings?

  “How about right now?” future-me says, and then we’re off, running straight for the pool.

  Right before Godfrey and I jump, I press my thumb on the panic button. I press it again and again and then I close my eyes and press down on the button as hard as I can.

  WHEN I OPEN MY eyes, the screen is blank, but I still see fragments of things: clouds that have fallen to the ground and hopped away, Godfrey’s tears, my tears, colors too aching to actually be colors, a constant tilt. I see streaks of light if I move my head too quickly, probably aftereffects of the medicine. I’ve never ended a session early—there wasn’t even time for a commercial—so I don’t know what I should be feeling. I’m groggy and yet there’s buzzing in my chest. How can one future feel so intense and beautiful and sad all at once. I feel . . . seized. And everything around me is still a bit off, surreal. Maybe the screen is broken (this is Dr. Chin, after all) and that’s why the colors were fucked up and once that was off, everything was derailed—a jagged spill into some emotionally complex world that can’t possibly truly exist.