by Junot Díaz
As I was finishing the review, an orange cat wandered into the kitchen and promptly jumped up onto the table, and for the first time I experienced a pang of disapproval: Jerry Roth was not a great disciplinarian with his animals, and the cat settled itself right on top of the newspapers. I moved a dish out of the way so the cat wouldn’t lick the butter from the toast, deciding as I did so that I might as well eat the rest of the toast myself, since it was already cold.
Did I call out at any point? Make myself known? I think I said hello when I stepped inside his house; I must have done that. But I felt quite sure, quite quickly, that no one was home, despite the cups and dishes still scattered on the table, despite the smell of breakfast in the air. The house had the quality of being recently and hurriedly evacuated, but not for any sinister reason—maybe the kids were late for swim practice, or the milk had run out. They had left the house in a rush, they would be back soon; but for now, it was mine.
All of my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel tea kettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemütlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs. To put it another way, cozy. Which did not describe my overheated apartment in the city, or the dim, chaotic ranch house I’d grown up in, places that were home but not home, not the home I wished to have, might one day have, if time or means or aptitude ever allowed it. A home I’d have to make. Sitting at Jerry Roth’s table, I felt suddenly that I’d spent my adult life engaged in the most impoverished kind of making. What did I have to show but lecture notes, a short book on other books, comments in the margins of seminar papers, an occasional terrarium? It occurred to me then that to make a kitchen like this required a breadth of imagination I might not be able to summon.
Back at the farmhouse there was a pedestal in the corner of the sitting room, and on the pedestal sat a large guestbook that held the names of past visitors, a book I had already leafed through many times, trying to kill the afternoon. Most of the names meant little to me, but once in a while a name would leap from the page and spread its light over the room—a moment both exhilarating and deeply shameful for me as I was reminded that I had no business being there. The guestbook adhered to a formula, full name followed by discipline and date of residency, and one of the earlier entries stopped me, because instead of putting down architect or composer or essayist, the visitor had written, in pretty capital letters, HOMEMAKER. But she was a poet, I knew—a poet of such importance that even I, who almost never read poetry, perked up at the sight of her name. She had written this in 1976, long enough ago that it was hard for me to interpret the word. Was it a political act to write that, a reclamation? A gesture of defiance? Or could it be modesty. Self-doubt. A wry critique of taxonomy and titles? Maybe, more simply, she felt it the most apt description of how she spent her days. I couldn’t tell; though the writing itself looked black and fresh, her intent remained distant and unreadable to me. Nevertheless this entry in the guestbook made me happy. In the years since she wrote it, her genius as a poet had been named and rewarded, and I liked how the word she chose early for herself now had the glamour of genius attached to it; how HOMEMAKER reached forward through time and lightly claimed that.
The orange cat shifted peaceably on the newspaper. I considered fixing myself another piece of toast, or finding a guest room and lying down to rest for a few minutes. My body was still tired and weird from all the running, and when I stood up from my chair, my knees buckled and I nearly lost my balance. I laid my palm on the knotted surface of the table. Through the wide kitchen windows I could see the rainbow horse waiting in the garden, and beyond that, the crooked apple tree. A fringe of young trees grew along the property line, weakly shielding the back lawn from the shaggier woods that rose up behind them, and while I was staring at the saplings, trying to figure out what kind they were, I saw a large body emerge from the forest and start lumbering toward the house. It took me a second to realize that the body belonged to a man. It was so pale and slow and enormous, and wearing such a short and colorful bathrobe, I thought unfairly at first that I must be seeing a woman, a morbidly obese woman in a swimming cap. But what I mistook for a swimming cap was actually a bald head. And as the man drew closer, I understood more and more clearly the size of him. He moved laboriously, shuffling more than walking, halting every few steps to catch his breath. His head shone and his shoulders heaved. The hem of his bathrobe fluttered above legs that looked at once curdled and bloated, swollen to the point of bursting. His leg flesh drooped over his knees.
I knew but did not accept that this man approaching the house was Jerry Roth. He made his slow, huffing way across the lawn in the unthinking manner of someone who had done so a thousand times before. Upon noticing something in the grass, he kicked at it briefly, but didn’t, probably couldn’t, bend over to pick it up. It seemed impossible that the man responsible for this house was the same as the huge, repellent person kicking at his lawn. I was too inexperienced to understand how the two were not at all irreconcilable.
Jerry Roth then lifted his eyes and blindly took in the whole of his house, or at least the back view of it, a view I had never seen, and I must have forgotten that I was as fully apparent to him as he was to me, because I continued to gaze at my ease from the kitchen, and felt truly shocked when his blank stare narrowed into a hard look, pointed in my direction like a gun. He stopped short and raised a heavy arm to block the glare from his eyes. I could see now that his bright bathrobe was covered in flocks of flying cranes, wings and necks outstretched. Suddenly he dropped his arm and began moving toward me at a pace I didn’t think possible for him.
In that moment I thought meaningfully, for the first time in several weeks, about William James; in this case, about William James and his bear. To explain, James published an influential paper in 1884, a paper titled “What Is an Emotion?,” and in this paper James put forth the theory that standard emotions such as sadness or rage or fear are not antecedent to the physiological responses we associate with them, but rather the product of these bodily changes. This was a radical notion at the time, a reversal of the usual way of seeing things. Common sense, according to James, tells us that when we lose our fortune, we are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. Yet this order of sequence is incorrect, James asserted: the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry; angry because we strike; afraid because we tremble. Coming between the stimulus (bear) and the feeling (fear) is the body: quickened heartbeat, shallow breathing, trembling lips, weakened limbs. And that collection of responses is what lets you know that you’re afraid.
My own research had very little to do with his theory of emotion, and I confess to feeling somewhat irritated when the bear would be brought up almost immediately upon my mentioning an interest in William James. Why did it loom so large in people’s memory, and why did it seem to be the only aspect of James’s work that they retained? It needled me, enough so that at some point I went back and reread the paper, only to discover that the famous bear made the most minor of appearances, invoked only twice and amid a series of instances. Much more remarkable to me was the story James tells of being a child of seven or eight years old and seeing a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it; James stirred the blood around and, his childish curiosity aroused, lifted the stick to watch the blood drip from it. Then, without warning, he fell over in a dead faint. James recalls feeling, even at such a young age, astonished that the mere presence of a pailful of red liquid could provoke such formidable bodily effects. The child and his bucket of blood—now why didn’t anyone remember that?
But as I stood there frozen in the kitchen of Jerry Roth’s house, I felt in my every muscle the indelibleness of James’s oft-cited example. It was simple. When you m
eet a bear in the woods, you run. And of course that is what I did: I ran.
In another version of the story, I jump out the nearest window and break my neck in the fall. Otherwise I am devoured, or thrown into a fire, or drowned. Barring that, I am dropped from a church steeple as punishment. In the version first recorded by Robert Southey, I manage to get away but am taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Corrections for being the vagrant that I am. It takes almost no effort to dig up these variations; over time, the trespasser turns from curious fox to bad old woman to bold little girl: a girl who is at the start called Silver Hair but who eventually gets saddled with the cloying name she hasn’t been able to shake since. Given the possibilities, it’s clearly best to be young, blond, and impertinent, because then you do not suffer any retribution for what you’ve done. Your escape is assured. As for me, I am over thirty-five, soft-spoken, brown-skinned—yet I too seem to have gotten off scot-free.
It can be difficult, however, to sift out retribution from reward, to really tell the two apart, commingled as they often are. For instance, after I left the farmhouse, having never touched my chapter on William James, my friend and I decided to have another go at it, this time more solemnly and deliberately than before, and to our indescribable relief, it stuck. My body grew larger and larger, unrecognizably larger, until suddenly one morning our daughter was born. We rigged up a sort of three-sided crib at the edge of the bed that allowed me to reach for her in the middle of the night and to nurse, without ever having to sit up or even raise my head from the pillow, and when she was done, I’d just slide her back on her special shelf and fall asleep again. Which is all to say that though she slept beside me I never worried, in those blurry months, about rolling over on my child and smothering her; among the many possibilities I worried over, this was not one of them, this was one of the few I could lay to rest. Strangely, though, my body remained convinced that I had to stay very still as I was sleeping, that I couldn’t toss about or sprawl, that I needed to contain myself to a sliver of the bed, as if to avoid the risk of something terrible happening. It was an odd compulsion, and my hand or arm would often go numb as the result of sleeping in this anxious, unmoving way. Then one night my daughter’s voice punctured my dreaming so cleanly that I was able to hold the shape of dream before it vanished, and the shape was the shape of Jerry Roth, the monstrous bulk of him, heaving softly beside me in the bed, and I knew, I knew, that I couldn’t move, because to wake him would be—to what? To die? My heart raced, my breath was shallow. I brought my hands to my chest and they were damp with sweat. In the darkness this felt like fear. But I lifted the elastic band on my underwear and put a hand between my legs, and I understood then that my rigid, dreaming body hadn’t been afraid. After wiping my fingers on the sheets, I reached out and found my daughter on her shelf.
As if not to be stopped, I became pregnant again, sooner than expected, and the apartment soon revealed itself as too expensive and too small, making the once unimaginable choice appear to us natural, attractive, inescapable, imminent: we moved to a house in the country. Our town is less than two hours away from the city by train; the backyards peter out into forests or fields; the houses are for the most part rundown, but with a lot of original detail, as the agent liked to say. A specialty food shop has bravely opened up, and there is a drive-in movie theater that still operates in the summer. At dusk, we flick the insects from our eyes and turn blankly to the wide, transparent sky, something like calm sliding over us.
But the days can be long, which I remember from my first stay in the country, and I often catch myself calculating the hours and little activities until dusk falls and the train comes in and the babies are put to sleep. The stretch between the morning nap and the afternoon nap always has a particular endlessness to it. My children are just different enough in age to be impossible to entertain simultaneously; what mesmerizes one infuriates the other; their developmental stages appear mortally opposed. I shuttle between the two of them to neither’s satisfaction. Like a bad employee I tend to hang back and dawdle, taking longer than necessary in the bathroom, surreptitiously checking my email, drawn helplessly to any window to watch the smooth, indifferent functioning of the seductive world outside. There’s usually not that much to see. A couple of guys from the power company checking the lines, or the older husband and wife from down the road, walking in single file and not talking, intent on their exercise. The mailman, of course; or in our case, the mailwoman. More rarely, the brown UPS truck. But every once in a while I’ll look out the window and see someone who doesn’t belong there, like an overweight girl wearing enormous headphones and jogging miserably, or a woman dressed in city clothes who tramps along the side of the road with a faint frown on her face. I have no way of knowing who she is and where she’s off to, but she looks so unlikely out there among the gravel and the weeds, and so impractically dressed, that I briefly wonder if her car has broken down. I think to open the door and call out to her, asking if she needs help, if everything’s all right, but to do so seems altogether impossible, as impossible as one of those huge prehistoric fish half-hibernating at the bottom of the tank knocking on the glass and mouthing hello! to a bright, quickly moving visitor on the other side. To our mutual embarrassment, though, she sees me, our eyes meet, and after automatically glancing away she looks back at me again and lifts her hand in a tentative wave. I wave back at her, electrified and sad. And then my daughter, in the far distance somewhere, lets out a long howl of frustration, and by the time I’ve gotten down on my hands and knees, rescued the wooden mixing spoon from under the stove, rinsed it off in hot water, hurried back to the window—the woman walking down the highway has already moved on, innocent of what waits for her, and passed out of sight.
TED CHIANG
The Great Silence
FROM e-flux journal
THE HUMANS USE Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?
We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi paradox.
One proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.
The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcertingly quiet.
Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.
Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Río Abajo Forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.
There was an African grey parrot named Alex. He was famous for his cognitive abilities. Famous among humans, that is.
A human researcher named Irene Pepperberg spent thirty years studying Alex. She found that not only did Alex know the words for shapes and colors, he actually understood the concepts of shape and color.
Many scientists were skeptical that a bird could grasp abstract concepts. Humans like to think they’re unique. But eventually Pepperberg convinced them that Alex wasn’t just repeating words, that he understood what he was saying.
Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who ca
me closest to being taken seriously as a communication partner by humans.
Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.”
If humans are looking for a connection with a nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?
Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot’s “contact call.”
In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity’s contact call.
In the wild, parrots address each other by name. One bird imitates another’s contact call to get the other bird’s attention.
If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.
Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we’ve heard them. It’s an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.
Humans are vocal learners too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.
Perhaps that’s why humans built Arecibo the way they did. A receiver doesn’t have to be a transmitter, but Arecibo is both. It’s an ear for listening, and a mouth for speaking.
