The Future for Curious People

by Gregory Sherl

  “Not really,” I say.

  “If you have to explain a joke, it isn’t one,” Madge says, under her breath. “I’ve told you that.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “We can just move on.”

  “No,” Dr. A. Plotnik says, with a knotted expression of deep concern and psychological know-how. “I think that your ‘joke’ is actually exposing an underlying fear. Are you worried that you won’t be able to come up with positive recollections of your early relationship with Madge?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “I can come up with plenty.”

  “Like what?” Madge asks.

  “Like . . .” I’m thinking of the first time she let me have sex with her. It was supposed to be very romantic. I tipped over a candle and burned a hole in her sofa. I decide not to mention it. Sex would be too animalistic, and Madge was pissed about the burned hole. “Like when we ate tacos on our first date,” I say. “And the waitress didn’t speak English very well. She was great, wasn’t she?”

  Dr. A. Plotnik turns to Madge. “Was that a positive memory?”

  “I think it’s a positive memory of the waitress,” Madge says.

  Dr. A. Plotnik sighs. “I understand,” she says to Madge. “I have plenty of positive recollections of my early relationship with Dr. Plotnik,” she says. “Plenty. But he’s always fuzzy on the details, and he has a little ADD and so his mind wanders in the middle of a session. And can I blame him for having a dysfunction? No, I cannot. I’m a woman of science.” And this is the moment when something inside of Dr. A. Plotnik fissures. She slams a hand down on her thigh which, for such a contained woman, can only be described as a gesture of pure outrage. “But when he gave me a Moleskine journal three days ago—a late birthday present—which . . . don’t even get me started on. I spend thirty birthdays with him and he still can’t remember not to pick up a sixteen-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent journal from Target that I’m going to hate? I’m growing old with this man. I think that deserves a string of pearls.” Dr. A. Plotnik gets up and shows us the evidence—one moleskine journal.

  I look at the journal and then at Madge, whose heart is really going out to Dr. A. Plotnik, and then I look at the journal again. “Plus, how many moles died to make that journal?” I say, hoping to lighten the mood. The two women stare at me. I feel I have no choice but to soldier on with the joke now, hoping it gets funny somehow. “Um, probably about four and a half moles, tops. It’s a small journal.”

  The extremely tense silence that descends can only be described as a pall. I’ve never experienced a real pall like this before.

  Dr. A. Plotnik lowers the journal and puts it down on the ink blotter on her desk. She picks up a lime green folder and returns to her seat. I glance at Madge, but she won’t make eye contact.

  Dr. A. Plotnik says, “Humor. I get it.” She smiles coldly. “Here is your workbook. It’s a weeklong process of daily study. Each session should last one hour. And then each of you will return to your envisionists and reevaluate your future together. If this doesn’t work, you return for another session with me, a more intensive session, and then try again. That will be your last try. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” Madge says.

  I nod, afraid to open my mouth.

  “Okay, then,” Dr. A. Plotnik says, standing up and reaching out to commence another round of handshaking, Madge first, then me. “Hopefully I won’t need to see you again, and this will be our final visit. I wish you both the best of luck.” She turns quickly back to her desk, flipping through her appointment calendar, signaling an abrupt end to our meeting.

  I shuffle quickly to the door, but Madge stops and says, “Thank you so much. And thank Dr. Plotnik for us, too. I really appreciate all of his time and effort on this relationship.”

  Dr. A. Plotnik’s head whips around. She eyes Madge suspiciously. “His time and effort?”

  “Yes,” Madge says, a little surprised by Dr. A. Plotnik’s tone. “He’s been really fantastic.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” Dr. A. Plotnik says, and then she regards us very seriously. “Listen, I think you two have an excellent shot at true happiness. Work very, very hard on your sessions. Rarely do I see a couple with such potential.” She squints at us.

  This catches me completely off-guard. “Thank you,” I say, giving a little nod. Me and Madge? We have rare potential? I’m embarrassed by my sudden hopefulness. I think back on the ultimate seating decision earlier. “We’re a good team,” I tell her.

  But Madge is a little stiff. “Yes,” she says. That’s it, just yes.

  We walk out of the office, and shut the door behind us. We look at each other, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking more at her than she is at me.

  “Did you hear that?” I say. “Rarely has she seen a couple with our potential.”

  “Yes,” Madge says, “I heard her. It’s just that it sounded, well”—she lowers her voice—“hard to believe. Didn’t you think? I mean, us?”

  I think about it. I look up toward the ceiling, replaying the moment in my head—Dr. A. Plotnik’s pinched eyes, the squirrel cheeks. I linger over the notion of Madge and me—rarely does Dr. A. Plotnik see a couple with this much potential? Do we really inspire that much hope? I’ve always thought of our relationship as one of those hidden gems. You know, the couple who might bicker some in public but that’s just a sign of how damn healthy and confident they are in their deeper bond. Outward signs of potential for the long haul, well, that’s not our thing. If I asked Amy and Bart and even Gunston if they thought we had real potential, would they say yes? Unlikely. Plus, Madge is good at reading people. She knows when they’re being just a little bit offish. There was a moment when I believed Dr. A. Plotnik, that brief moment, now barely a memory, when I believed that Madge and I were full of potential, when we were rarities in love.

  “Maybe it was a little hard to believe,” I admit. “Maybe so.”

  We walk down the hall toward the waiting room, but then Madge stops abruptly and turns to me. “ ‘About four and a half moles, tops? It’s a small journal?’ I mean, what were you thinking? Moleskine journals aren’t made of actual moles.”

  “That’s why it’s funny.” I shrug. “Or not.”

  THAT NIGHT, I EMERGE from the bathroom to find Madge standing on the mattress of our bed. She’s clutching Dr. A. Plotnik’s workbook (written by Dr. A. Plotnik), which she’d decided to read cover to cover before we did any of our sessions. This postponement was fine with me, as I’ve been dreading the sessions. I’m fairly sure we’ll have to look deeply into each other’s eyes, and I’m dead set against mandatory gazing.

  “It’s right here,” Madge says. “It just hovers.”

  “What’s right where?”

  “That smell!”

  “Oh, right. The death,” I say.

  “It is death, isn’t it? This isn’t good, Godfrey. Death is hovering above our bed. The place we’re supposed to make love. Death!”

  “I didn’t say it was good!”

  “It’s worse than your identity crisis.”

  “I thought it was an identity issue. When was it upgraded to a crisis?” I ask sarcastically but also a little alarmed. “I found my wallet, you know. I told you that.”

  She flops onto the bed. “What are we going to do about it?”

  “I think it might be a dead mouse.”

  “That died in the air above our bed?”

  “Stinks move and linger and hang. It’s probably just a dead mouse in the wall.”

  “We’re fucked.”

  “Why would you say that?” I say, crawling across the bed to her.

  Madge lies there, closing her eyes tight. “You should read the examples in the book. Some people have had such great romantic beginnings. People talk about buying peaches in a market together and getting lost on a bus together. One woman talks about this carriage ride. A carriage ride! I mean, how can we compete with that?”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to be competing.�
��

  “You know what I mean.” She rolls away from me and pulls her knees to her chest. “We’re doomed to that shitty little house and that fucking stupid seeing-eye dog and you creeping out my niece!”

  “What?” I say. “I didn’t creep out your niece!”

  “She told me, Godfrey, that you creep her out. She’s a sweet kid! Completely innocent!”

  “You think I liked seeing an old pervie version of myself in the basement? With my gelled hair? You think I liked looking at your ugly shoes?”

  “Hey, I wear those shoes now!”

  “I don’t like them. There, I said it.”

  There’s a quiet moment. I flop back onto the bed. I think of origami and how I wish it were human. One minute I could be a puffed-up box and the next minute a crane. “We are fucked,” I finally say, agreeing. “You really didn’t like the house?”

  “No. And the seeing-eye dog growled at me in the car,” she says. “Those dogs are supposed to be completely gentle. And then I hit it. I don’t think you’re supposed to hit seeing-eye dogs in training.”

  I love Madge for confessing she hit the seeing-eye dog. I do. I roll toward her. “Look at me,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “C’mon, Madgy.”

  She slowly turns.

  I look deeply into her eyes. “I think you’re beautiful. I thought you were beautiful the first moment I saw you. And I didn’t love the waitress. I loved the way you talked to her in Spanish. All chopped up. The way your mouth worked out the words so beautifully. And you used your hands.” I pick them up, place them in mine. “These beautiful hands.”

  Madge smiles. These are the moments I pride myself on—quiet ones that the public never sees. We do have potential, even if it’s not completely obvious to anyone else.

  “That’s pretty good,” Madge says.

  “Isn’t it?” I say. “Screw that woman and her carriage ride! We’ve got a mythology. We can do this.”

  Madge kisses me passionately, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to call Chin and cancel the five-for-three deal. I love Madge. It’s decided, I think as I undo the row of three small buttons on her pajama top. We’re going to do this.

  We start to have sex and she closes her eyes and keeps them closed. I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t want to look at me. It’s something else; I feel it, too, the overwhelming fear that we’re about to crash into something. The stench of a small death still lingers while we keep going. I imagine the disintegrating mouse and then remember the mice in the swimming pool, how they glinted and pivoted like fish and the woman, her rubber cap wet and shiny like a dome, waving to me.

  Evelyn

  BEES AND BEARS

  I flop down on my couch with my coat still on, breathless from the bike ride, and I just stare. Chin didn’t blacklist me. He ferreted his fluffy blond eyebrows, and said, “Sister, you need to Zen your shit out.” He sold me a box of tea—handmade from some ancient mee-maw of his and it smells like a mee-maw a little, mints and mothballs—and he sent me home.

  And now I sit here, like I’ve just come down from a bad trip—shrooms or frog licking or something—and I’m thinking, In my future with Mark Standing, I have an affair with Godfrey Burkes? What the hell? Who is Godfrey Burkes? Why was he on our lawn? Why did Adam have a gun? And, Jesus, Dot went to jail!

  There’s a line from Chin’s forms that’s always stuck with me: In the case of true love, there can be system failures. Is it wise to trust a doctor who believes in true love? Probably not. Still, I wonder—for one brief moment—if I’ve just experienced a true-love-induced system failure.

  No, no, no. None of it was real. I just put in too many names and screwed it all up.

  I tell myself to breathe. I quote some George Burns to soothe myself: Look to the future, because that is where you’ll spend the rest of your life. Look to the future, the future . . . I lift the cardboard box of tea bags and sniff a mee-maw and wonder if I should drink mee-maw-flavored tea and, if I do, will it Zen my shit out?

  I don’t know how long I sit there like that, but eventually I snap to attention because there’s a knock at the door.

  “Coming!” I call out. I don’t have a doorbell—I find their buzzes jarring, like little electric shocks. When I moved in, I disconnected it, ripped the wires right out of the box, meaning I will probably not be getting my deposit back.

  I peer out the peephole. It’s Adrian. He’s stepped back from the door, his arms crossed on his chest. I can tell immediately that he has processed our conversation and is now more pissed off than he was while trying to attach a love note to my bike basket with ear bud wires. It’s a small apartment, and he knows that I’m already at the door. He doesn’t knock again.

  Through the door he says, “I’m here to pick up my stuff. I texted earlier.” A couple of days ago, he left an exhaustive list of things I struggle to find significant.

  I open the door and we look at each other like strangers who’ve just happened to constantly fall into bed with each other over the last few years.

  “Come in,” I tell him, but he doesn’t move. His arms are still crossed on his chest. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. “You can come in.” I point behind me, toward everything I own. “It’s just a couple of steps, I promise.”

  Finally, he walks into the living room. I point to a cardboard box. “It should all be in there.”

  Adrian isn’t making eye contact with me, but he’s burned holes through my carpet, the hem of my skirt, and for a second, my collarbone.

  He gets on his knees and starts shuffling through the box. I stand behind him as he sorts through his stuff, including a broken drumstick and a map of Carrboro, North Carolina.

  “You could’ve put my toothbrush in a Baggie or something,” he says, holding the purple toothbrush in his hand, his thumb running over the worn bristles.

  “You’re supposed to switch your toothbrush out every three months,” I say defensively.

  “Has it been that long?”

  I nod.

  “Still, you have small sandwich bags.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, but really, I’m not sorry. The toothbrush is a cesspool of the worst parts that have crowded both of us. When did we invite such things in? I’m wondering how clean my mouth has been these last three months. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I found the map, though.”

  He drops the toothbrush and picks up the map, touches it gently. “Cat’s Cradle is one of the greatest venues in the country,” he tells me. “Too bad you won’t be with us when we play there.”

  “I’ll have to read about it on the music blogs.”

  “What about the Wii?” He pulls it out of the box. I left the cords attached—they dangle half inside the cardboard box and half out. “We went halfsies on it, so it really is both of ours.”

  “Our child.”

  Adrian doesn’t say anything. Is he getting sentimental?

  He stands up and immediately starts fishing through his pockets. He pulls out a few crumpled bills and hands them to me. “I owe you for the Wii. Here.”

  I don’t bother counting the money even though I know it can’t possibly cover half of the game system. A gesture is a gesture, I tell myself. Besides, I was the one who broke up with him. Let him keep the Wii.

  “How are our Caroline and Bruce?” Adrian’s parents.

  “You shouldn’t miss them.”

  “But I do.”

  He sighs. “You want too much, Evelyn.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like there’s some hole in you that no one can fill up.”

  “I think everyone has a hole inside of them that can’t be filled. I mean, that’s why religions exist and why some people excel despite all odds.”

  He shakes his head. “Yours is personal. I’m just telling you this for your own good.”

  I yearn. So what? “I want things that normal people want, Adrian.” I want to pick the right person and build
a family of my own. What’s wrong with that?

  “You want those things too much, and as long as we’re being painfully honest—”

  “You’re being painfully honest. I’m not.”

  “You’re also afraid of things that are out of your control,” he says. “That’s why you like to spend all day shelving books in alphabetical order.”

  “You have no idea what a librarian actually does,” I tell him. We’ve been over this.

  “And it’s why you’re obsessed with that Chin guy, who’s a flim-flam man.”

  “He showed me our future, Adrian. We fought over cheese.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad to me, Evelyn. Does it? In the long run? Sometimes you just have to commit to something that’s not perfect. And you have to commit to the whole future of it. And that can’t be known and it can’t be controlled. I think that’s just life, you know? The sun wakes us up every morning and you don’t know what the day will bring.”

  I don’t want Adrian to be right, but what if he is? And then my mind pivots because something doesn’t quite sound natural. I tilt my head. “Are you writing a song about this?”

  “What?”

  “That last part sounded like bad song lyrics. You’re testing out song lyrics on me, in the form of an argument, aren’t you?”

  “My life and my art are very entwined,” he says defensively.

  Now his tangibles, what few there were, are in a cardboard box and that box is leaving. His stupid broken drumstick. His stupid map of Carrboro, North Carolina. His stupid fucking cesspool of a toothbrush. Damn it. I don’t want him to stay, but I don’t want him to go.

  Adrian picks up the cardboard box. “I guess I should pretend to have somewhere important to go,” he says.

  I follow him to the front door and open it.

  Then the lag. We both want this to end, but we don’t know how. Or we both want to stay, but we don’t know why.

  I feel stuck to the doorframe. I think of spiderwebs stuck to trees, gnats stuck to the spiderwebs.

  Adrian is at the other side of the doorframe. Is he also stuck? He’s holding the cardboard box like an infant he took out of the hospital for the first time. The box isn’t heavy, but it looks like it’s weighing him down, causing his feet to sink beneath the hallway carpet. Soon his ankles will be gone.