The Future for Curious People

by Gregory Sherl

  “Is this the last words part?” he says.

  Last words? Last words of famous dead people are some of my favorites. My head is flooded with them. Churchill’s “I’m bored with it all.” Joan Crawford telling her praying housekeeper, “Damn it . . . Don’t you dare ask God to help me.” Pancho Villa saying, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Emily Dickinson’s “I must go in, the fog is rising.” Oh, or Oscar Wilde, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

  But I choose to say, “Beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “Those were Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last words. Her husband had asked her how she felt.”

  He shakes his head. “The quote machine. I always thought you were kind of like a bottom feeder of other people’s words,” he says. “But shit. I miss the quotes.”

  “A bottom feeder?” This is the worst thing Adrian’s ever said to me, but it’s also one of the smartest things he’s ever said. It doesn’t hurt as much as it baffles me. Did I ever really know Adrian? “Have you changed on me already?”

  “I’ve changed a lot.”

  “How?”

  “For one, I’m going to a legit envisionist, not that Chin bullshit.”

  “But I thought you said it was all new-agey bourgeois bullshit.”

  “I’m part of the bourgeoisie, I guess.” He shrugs and then nods toward the kitchen. “I want my height erased from the doorjamb.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I came to erase myself completely. I’m trying to move into the future now, Evelyn. You should be able to get that.”

  “You think I can erase your height and it’ll be like you were never here?”

  “I just want it erased. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  He stands there. “Do you have any last words for me that aren’t ripped off from someone else?”

  “Yeah, I do. Don’t wear your own band’s T-shirt on stage,” I tell him.

  He looks down and I know that under his sweater he’s wearing one of his own band’s T-shirts. “I wouldn’t have had to if you were any better at selling our merch.”

  I want to tell him the music might be the problem, not the way I stood behind a card table, with an assortment of demos and T-shirts splashed out in front of me. I don’t say it because I don’t actually want to hurt him.

  I’m already beginning to feel lonely—the hole in me that maybe no one can fill. Or maybe I’m lonely because Adrian is more outside my front door than inside my front door and that means something. Even inches mean something. First it’s inches and then it’s feet, yardsticks laid out into football fields, a printing press and then so many spines filled with ink that every county needs a library, sometimes dozens. At some point, continents shifted and this is all because some Neanderthal was once closer to being outside a cave than inside it. Small stays fragile and even big is still fragile. Possible futures are the most fragile but they always end before something can truly break. Were Adrian and I small, or were we big? I know which crashes harder, but which crashes longer?

  And what if he’s right and fighting over cheese isn’t so bad in the long run? What if not committing to something that’s imperfect is just a way of avoiding the future?

  Adrian nods. His nod says, I’ve got a cardboard box with a broken drumstick, a purple toothbrush, a Wii, and a map of Carrboro, North Carolina. I’ll be fine.

  I lean forward, unsticking myself from the doorframe and kiss Adrian on the cheek so lightly I will probably forget I did it. Adrian shifts the cardboard box a little to the left and shrugs. I watch him walk away—seven steps to be exact—before turning down the stairwell.

  I stand at the door, staring at the chipped paint, the dirty knob. If someone asked me what I was doing, I would say, I don’t know. Please tell me. I am not waiting for Adrian to come back. I know that.

  I don’t move. I stand at my front door for minutes. This is not a habit, but maybe it will turn into one. Me, waiting at doors, for nothing in particular. On first dates, men will ask me about my hobbies and I will tell them, Standing at front doors, as I scrape the cheese off the top of my chicken parmesan. It’s a lifestyle choice.

  One half-filled cardboard box gone, and once inside the apartment, it feels completely empty, like movers just showed up and packed up everything—even stripped the paint from the walls. Sound was evicted. Here I am, alone. My choice but still alone. The quiet gets loud—this buzzing. Louder.

  I think maybe there are bees in my apartment.

  I am certain there are bees in my apartment.

  A whole hive of bees. Two hives. A dozen hives. Soon the bears will come. I will die in a quiet apartment, alone and stung and mauled. My choice but still alone.

  Godfrey

  FIVE FOR THREE

  So I decide to go through with the five-for-three deal with Chin. How do I rationalize this? It’s an opportunity I’ll never have again and completely harmless, as no one will know, and I can’t contract any diseases in the process. I’m not going to a topless car wash or anything. I’m pretty sure that Madge would take this opportunity if it were offered to her. Then I wonder if Madge is taking an opportunity like this. And I say to myself, “Good for Madge.” At our five-year anniversary, we’ll confess to each other and it’ll be this little silly moment. “Can you imagine doing that now? Insane! Ridiculous!”

  And honestly, it’s not like I’m going to look up some old girlfriend in real life because we have some exquisite life, in which we, what? Shop together at IKEA without bickering?

  I look up benign yet stubborn gallbladder issues, which ends up to be unnecessary because I successfully peel out of work before I collide with Bart and his genetically compromised gallbladder and arrive for my appointment ready to take care of all five sessions at once.

  While I strap on a helmet, Chin assures me he’ll closely monitor my needs. There’s the noise of coins clunking in the coin-op and a light fog rolls over my eyes. I hear the door open and close.

  My first envisioning choice is obvious: Liz Chase.

  Liz Chase and Godfrey Burkes

  A Chin Production

  Future-me looks like he should be worried about his cholesterol. If he isn’t worried about his triglycerides, I’m worried for him. Maybe this is what happens when you marry your high-school sweetheart, the one who took your virginity and didn’t complain when the condom didn’t stay dry long enough to get through a commercial break for Friends. Now when I think of Liz Chase, I think of her sweetness, how she pretended it was always supposed to be like this—so succinct, so quiet.

  I loved her in a way any sixteen-year-old boy could love a girl named Liz Chase and her practicing for future sexy bras (not yet lace but teasing in that direction with the little bow where the clasp goes in the front) and her smiling as she slid shut the bottom drawer she designated the “elephant graveyard” for the sports bras of her youth—that being from when she was fifteen, of course. By all of this, I mean I loved her hopelessly, and even now, she is still the first woman I think of when Madge is at Fontana’s picking up something to make for dinner, and I am alone with a box of tissues, a bottle of lotion, and a complete lack of self-worth.

  After I broke up with her for no good reason, she got into the back of Rob Linger’s father’s Chevy pickup, and I regretted letting her go—especially to Rob Linger.

  But this time, fuck you, Rob Linger.

  In fifteen years, future-me is shaving. He nicks the bottom side of his left cheek, and he’s stuck a piece of toilet paper over the cut. Then he straightens his tie, but it doesn’t work. No matter how long he tries to fix the tie, it just can’t get itself down to his belt. That stomach—who let that happen?

  Future-me leaves the bathroom and heads downstairs. The house is middle income. In this future, I wear a tie to work, but I’m not raking it in.

  Downstairs looks like a Reagan wet dream: a long, wooden kitchen table with place settings, pancakes in the middle, syrup
, butter, toast, and kids—all 2.5 of them. The kids are a complete blur, but the high chair is pink, so I assume the little one is a girl.

  Liz always wanted a girl. She wanted to name her Annabelle. There were so many different ways you can go with it, she used to say. Anna, Belle, Bells. Or, you know, Annabelle. I would just nod, barely listening, wondering when I’d be allowed to unzip my pants again.

  I want to fast-forward this session to the part where I redeem myself, but I think if it were possible to do that during an envisioning session, I might be fast-forwarding forever.

  Past the kitchen table, Liz closes the fridge and turns around. She looks weirdly the same, just slightly stretched out like the dummy my mother had for sewing—the one with the expandable body. Holding a carton of orange juice, Liz is in a bathrobe she’s probably owned since the birth of our first child. I can’t tell what’s a stain or fabric pattern.

  There’s no good morning from Liz. Future-me doesn’t say anything either—he just sits down at the head of the table, between two of his kids. The only thing not fuzzy is the food, and really, it’s the only thing worth looking at. It’s lush and glossy and brimming.

  Liz walks around the table, pouring juice into the kids’ cups first, before filling mine and then hers. Still, she says nothing. She sits at the other end of the kitchen table, next to .5 in the pink high chair.

  “My neck,” future-me says. “It hurts when I turn to the left.”

  “Then just don’t turn that way,” Liz says. Her voice is colder than I remember, like it got stuck in an ice storm. Even after fifteen years of marriage, what if I still can’t give her an orgasm? I remind myself to send Rob Linger a thank-you card.

  Why does my neck hurt? Is it from constantly shifting the belly weight? I imagine even my arms must feel heavy, my feet the equivalent of anvils.

  Future-me answers my question when he says, “How many more nights on the couch?”

  Liz shifts without looking over, like I’m the reason malaria still kills millions every year or why so many in this world go without potable water.

  What did I do to deserve the couch? Not take the trash out? Forget an anniversary, miss one of the kid’s clarinet recitals? I don’t even know how old my children are. When does one start playing the clarinet?

  But I know the truth immediately. I’m a Thigpen. I’ve been caught seducing other women. Even in this bulbous state, I’ve become the animal I always knew I would be. (Does my mother know?)

  If winning is 2.5 kids and a wife who makes you sleep on the couch, you can keep it all, Rob Linger. (Madge wants one supersmart kid, so we can “maintain some semblance of our selfhoods.” Me? I’d like a brood, but I don’t ever say that because it makes me sound like a Neanderthal.)

  “It’s your turn to carpool,” Liz says.

  Here I am, a bloated Thigpen who has to drive half the neighborhood kids to school.

  “Okay, kids,” Liz says, standing up from the kitchen table, “time for school.”

  The kids moan and slide out of their seats. Liz takes .5 out of her high chair and follows the kids into the other room.

  Future-me barely touched his breakfast. Maybe this rough patch in my future marriage will save me from an early heart attack. He heads outside and gets in the driver’s seat as the older kids pile into the minivan. They’re faceless, my kids, and it creeps me out something awful. I’m surprised I’ve stuck with this session for so long. I’m depressed now, and it looks like I’ll be just as depressed in fifteen years. Do good envisioning sessions even exist, or are they all secretly backed by big pharmaceuticals with the intention of peddling more antidepressants?

  Future-me starts the minivan. Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” comes on the radio. I don’t know what’s more surprising: the fact that they still play Barry Manilow on the radio in fifteen years or that I’ll be okay with listening to Barry Manilow on the radio in fifteen years.

  Future-me hums along—I like humming—and checks the rearview mirror before putting the minivan in reverse. He tenses. I worry he’s about to grab his left arm, grunt, and die right there, in front of his children who will grow up to resent him, not fifty feet from a wife who will quickly remarry (probably Rob Linger). I wait for his head to fall against the steering wheel, causing the horn to blare, right before a slow fade to black.

  But then I notice why future-me tenses. In the rearview mirror: legs.

  What feels like miles of them.

  Miles of legs the color of butter on a bike that might be the sky if the sky were coasting along pavement in rain boots with flowers sprouting on them. It’s a brief moment that stretches in super slow-mo for hours, years. Still, it doesn’t last long enough. A kick in my gut that just makes me hungrier. It’s one of those moments—a butterfly you touch—that will last.

  A pair of legs and a realization that right here, paper-gowned, doped up in a renovated Chinese restaurant turned new-age tarot card reader, I’m staring at a future that—in this moment—makes my heart pitch forward in my chest in a way I haven’t felt until right now watching those legs go through a rearview mirror of a minivan I haven’t purchased yet.

  YEAH, LIZ CHASE WAS a mistake. All I want to know about are the legs. I start to unhook the helmet, but Chin walks in and says, “Whoa, whoa!”

  “What if I’m not cut out for futures? I might be peaking.”

  Chin looks at me doubtfully. “Well, you can quit if you want, but you still signed up to pay for three—just instead of five, you’ll get one.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  I look around the room and then, for the first time, taped to the wall next to the examination room door is a sign: PLEASE, NO MASTURBATING. THANK YOU, THE MANAGEMENT. But someone had some fun with a black marker and now it reads PLEASE, NO MASTURBATING THE MANAGEMENT.

  “Look,” Chin says, “what if high-school Godfrey Burkes really underestimated himself ? Maybe you should set your sights a little higher. Not too high, but, you know, higher.”

  Chin’s right. What if high-school Godfrey Burkes could’ve been head of the football team, what if he could’ve thrown a football through a tire swinging from the branch of a linden tree? I decide to go for it.

  Tina Whooten and Godfrey Burkes

  A Chin Production

  Future-me stands in a large kitchen, hands in his pockets, between the sink and the island. He looks uncomfortable, as if he’s never been here before. I notice a bowl of fruit that might be plastic, and then Tina Whooten walks in wearing a pencil skirt. I wonder if I’m the kind of husband who picked out this skirt for her before going to the movie that we left early so we could have sex in the back of our sedan before getting back to the kids and babysitter who charges twice as much as she should because she can, because even after fifteen years I can never get enough time alone with Tina Whooten.

  Everything is so clear I wonder if this is a reality television show or an actual envisionist session. Maybe this is just someone who resembles me, standing around and being awkward and getting paid for it because he’s on TV.

  But then Tina looks over at future-me, surprised but only for an instant.

  “Oh fuck, again?” It comes out as a sigh, like it’s the third time she’s said it today. She walks past me and pours a cup of coffee, not offering me any.

  Maybe it goes without saying, but “Oh fuck, again?” is not what I hope to hear my hot future wife say when she sees me.

  “Godfrey Burkes, right?” she says as she starts to peel kiwis at the sink, not looking back at me.

  I’m kind of jacked that she remembers me, but then shouldn’t she know me because we’re married?

  Future-me shifts helplessly while I do the same thing on the examination table, the helmet making me feel like an astronaut with nowhere to go.

  Then I remember the rules. Or part of them—God knows what little attention I was paying to them. There was a line that if you don’t believe in your own future with a certain person, it cannot rea
lly be envisioned.

  Seriously, can I not even dream of being married to Tina Whooten?

  And suddenly I feel like I’m in tenth-grade biology, sitting behind Tina Whooten, the Tina Whooten who filled the stands for every home volleyball game, even though the school team hadn’t had a winning record since the late 1970s. Tina Whooten, two years older—why was she even in tenth-grade biology as a senior?

  “Tenth grade was it? You couldn’t keep your eyes off my tits,” she says.

  Real-me nods. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her tits, but neither could half the class. That included more than a few girls and every teacher with a moderate amount of testosterone.

  If it were a yearbook category, Tina Whooten would’ve been voted Most Likely to Be Envisioned Fifteen Years from Now.

  “Don’t you have something better to do?” she says.

  Future-me, he or I or we, still hasn’t said anything. Sometimes it’s distracting to breathe in two different places at the same time. Future-me shrugs. He seems just as confused as I am.

  Everything is so goddamn clear, especially Tina’s shiny skin. I wonder if she applies lotion on it or if the lotion does it itself. Like the lotion says, No, no, I’ve got this. You just keep lying there.

  There’s a pause. My mouth is dry.

  Tina calls out, “Sarge!” and I expect a retriever, but a man’s voice calls out from another room and then he appears. He’s holding a trash bag. Tina holds her coffee and smiles at him. He’s just as clear as Tina and so good-looking I want to cover myself, call my mother and Thigpen and say, “Can you try again?”

  Tina looks at the man like she always wants him to be pinning her against a wall. He smiles at her before looking at future-me, who is now even more confused.

  “Oh, hey man,” he says to future-me. “Sarge.” There’s a pause. “I’m Tina’s husband.” He shakes my hand with his free hand. He only looks at me for a second, and then it’s back to his wife. His hand stays gripped around mine. “From high school?”