by Ben Lerner
I looked closely at the legal pad. At the top were some phrases I’d used about O’Brien’s writing, placed in quotations, and then some of Calvin’s phrases about those phrases, e.g., “Could apply to Waldrop’s trilogy,” which were starred. But the bulk of the writing resembled a private code of miniaturized and simplified letters and vertical strokes or, in places, seismographic readouts—a shorthand for what our language couldn’t represent, a poem.
* * *
Around the time the storm struck Cuba, devastating Santiago, the box of books arrived at my apartment. I’d spared no expense on the self-publishing website, opting for a run of fifty hardcovers with full-color images—each book had cost around forty dollars. Anita wanted copies to mail to family in El Salvador; Aaron planned to put one in each of the classroom libraries; Roberto would want to share them with friends. I liked to think selling my unwritten novel had paid for these unsalable volumes, was proud of the excess I’d keep secret from Roberto. Eager to see what they looked like, I carried the surprisingly heavy box, no doubt increasing my intrathoracic pressure dramatically, upstairs to my apartment, where I opened it hurriedly, cutting away the brown packing tape with a key.
I realized I’d never been as happy to receive any of my own published volumes. Ripping the tape off, I suddenly had the strange sensation that I was opening a box filled with copies of the book for which I was being paid in advance; I hesitated, my eagerness evaporating, then opened the lid and saw the handsome copies of To the Future. The text itself was only four pages long, but those four pages were the result of months of Internet research, outlining, drafting by hand, typing, revising, formatting—each stage in the process of composition dilated into an academic lesson about grammar, computer literacy, etc. Professionally bound, it had a certain heft; it did not feel like a vanity project, but like a real children’s book. I was excited to think how excited Roberto would be.
Even the fifteen copies I was carrying grew heavy as I walked up Fourth Avenue toward Sunset Park, sweating profusely in the unseasonable humidity. The line at the BP gas station on Douglass Street stretched around the corner, motorists hoarding fuel before the storm, some filling red plastic containers in addition to their cars, but otherwise there was no sign of an imminent disaster. Eventually I moved to Fifth Avenue to avoid all the fencing and construction walkways where the new condos were going up on Fourth, “the latest in urban living.” By the time I reached Green-Wood Cemetery, my arms and shoulders ached from the weight of the little books, as if they had more than a material heaviness. As I passed I could hear the monk parakeets singing in the spires of the cemetery’s gate; generations of the bright green birds had been nesting there since they first escaped from a damaged crate at JFK. Before I reached the school, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the $2,000 could be used by Roberto’s family in much more practical ways. But then, Anita—assuming she needed it—would never accept money from me. Maybe Aaron could help arrange some small anonymous scholarship for Roberto once we’d finished working together; my advance could secretly fund more than one kind of largesse simultaneously. Or maybe I should be bankrolling Calvin’s therapy. Or maybe—I interrupted myself: You should celebrate, not second-guess, this kind of reckless expenditure; don’t calculate opportunity costs or insert it into the network of abstract exchange.
Roberto, however, was not in a celebratory mood. He smiled politely at the books, flipped through one, but didn’t seem proud or particularly impressed; I had to fight off the desire to tell him how much they’d cost to make. I kept congratulating him enthusiastically on becoming a published author, but to no avail. Instead, he wanted to talk about what he referred to as the “superstorm,” how he was worried he’d have to go live with his cousins in Pittsburgh. I explained, as Aaron had no doubt already explained, that Sunset Park was high up, out of reach of the water, and that, while his building or the school might lose power for a while, he had nothing to fear; he could rest assured his parents were prepared. But what if we run out of water to drink? he asked me. What if there are “water wars”? He’d clearly seen another special on the Discovery Channel.
Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030, but I assured him he had no reason to worry, and tried to refocus his attention on the high production value of our own study of extinction.
“What are we going to do next?” he asked. “Our next project?”
“I’m not sure,” I responded, frustrated. I wasn’t even sure how much longer I could work with Roberto once my leave ended and I began to face a real deadline for my book or became a kind of father. I’d imagined that To the Future might help bring us closure.
“Will we do another book?” He sounded as though he hoped we wouldn’t.
“You haven’t even looked at this one,” I said, trying to sound light, and not disappointed. “This is the product of all our hard work. We sweated over every sentence.”
“Because I want to make a movie next,” Roberto said, smiling a little apologetically. A mature incisor was coming in at a problematic angle, a new development since I’d left for Marfa. “Your iPhone has a movie camera. We can add lots of special effects and post it on YouTube.”
“Anybody can make a movie on their iPhone,” I said, “not everybody has published a book like this.” I rapped my knuckles on the hardcover. I felt like a used-car salesman.
“We could make a movie of the tsunami,” he said, meaning the hurricane. “It’s also good to have a camera to film people so they don’t try to rob you. Beat you up. To have surveying,” he said, meaning surveillance.
“Roberto,” I said, making myself smile, channeling Peggy Noonan, who was herself a channel, “what is this book about if not how science is always improving, correcting its past mistakes?” I thought of Judd’s boxes in the desert, their terrible patience. “A young future scientist like you should have some faith in our ability to fix things,” in our ability to colonize the moon. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave—to brave people with papeles, I didn’t go on to say. “People are going to work together to develop new solutions to all these problems you’re worried about. For instance,” I said, “they”—whoever they were—“are developing new seawalls to keep the water out, special floodgates.” I resolved to continue our work together: “Maybe we should write a book about that next? If you really want, maybe we can make a book trailer for it, I mean a little movie about it on the iPhone.” I opened one of the books and stood it on the desk. “But we should take a minute to feel good about this, okay?”
We sat there smiling anxiously at one another, our masterpiece between us. Roberto nodded, but didn’t speak. The room had that particular quality of silence that obtains when many loud bodies have recently left. I could hear kids laughing and shrieking on the street below as they were handed off to relatives and guardians; I thought I could detect an added hint of desperation, as if the children had registered a precipitous change in atmospheric pressure. I could hear Chancho, the class’s hamster, scurrying around in the cage against the wall behind me, imagined Daniel was refilling its water bottle, resisted the temptation to turn around. In the distance: a jackhammer, airplane noise, the bell of a pushcart vendor selling nieves. A car blasting cumbia stopped at the nearest corner; the music receded once the light turned green.
TO THE FUTURE
by Roberto Ortiz
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. THE MISTAKE
II. THE CORRECTION
III. THE TRUE DINOSAUR
CONCLUSION: SCIENCE ON THE MOVE
CHAPTER ONE: THE MISTAKE
Othniel Marsh was the paleontologist who in 1877 discovered a dinosaur called the apatosaurus. “apatosaurus” means “deceptive lizard.” This is a funny name since Marsh himself would be deceived about the “apatosaurus.”
In 1879 Marsh thought he had found another species of dinosaur. In fact, he had found more apatosaurus bones but no head. He found a head that he thought be
longed to a new dinosaur, but really it was the skull of a camarasaurus. He named this fake dinosaur brontosaurus! “Brontosaurus” means “thunder lizard” in Greek.
CHAPTER TWO: THE CORRECTION
In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn’t know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels—and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn’t know.
This stamp shows how popular the brontosaurus was. Even in 1989, when this stamp was made, which was 86 years after scientists discovered the brontosaurus didn’t exist, people were still using the name “brontosaurus” and imagining that dinosaur.
CHAPTER THREE: THE TRUE DINOSAUR
The apatosaurus lived in the Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. The apatosaurus was one of the biggest animals that ever lived. It weighed more than 30 tons, was up to 90 feet long, and could be 15 feet tall at the hips. Its head was less than two feet long, which is small for such a big body. It had a long skull and a tiny brain. Its teeth were thin, like pencils. Its tail was up to fifty feet long. The apatosaurus was an herbivore, which means it ate only plants. It ate stones that helped it grind up and digest the plants.
One strange fact about the apatosaurus is that its nostrils were located on top of its head. Scientists don’t know why. At first they thought this maybe helped the apatosaurus breathe in water, but since apatosaurus fossils have been found far away from any bodies of water, scientists no longer think this is true. It remains a mystery.
CONCLUSION: SCIENCE ON THE MOVE
The story of the apatosaurus shows how science always changes. It shows this because first Othniel Marsh discovered a dinosaur called the apatosaurus. Later he thought he found a new species of dinosaur. But it was just an apatosaurus with a different head. Then this false dinosaur got famous. Scientists corrected their mistake, but many museum labels didn’t. People still think there is a dinosaur called the brontosaurus.
Scientists are learning that every day there is something new to discover. Many new discoveries change our thoughts about the past. So science is infinite and goes on forever. Science is always on the move with its face to the future.
THE END
* * *
Again we did the things one does: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights, drew the bath. Then we got into bed and projected Back to the Future onto the wall; it could be our tradition for once-in-a-generation weather, I’d suggested to Alex, the way some families watch the same movie every Christmas, except we weren’t a family. Branches scraped against the windows, casting their shadows in the 1980s, the 1950s; a couple of plastic trash cans were blown down the street, and rain hit the skylight hard enough that it sounded like hail. By the time the storm made landfall, Marty was teaching Chuck Berry how to play rock and roll in the past, which meant that, when he got back to the future, white people would have invented, not appropriated, that musical form; I spent a few minutes describing this ideological mechanism to Alex before I realized she was asleep. I drifted off too, and when I woke, I walked to the window; it was still raining hard, but the yellow of the streetlamps revealed a mundane scene; a few large branches had fallen, but no trees. We never lost power. Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.
Except it had arrived, just not for us. Subway and traffic tunnels in lower Manhattan had filled with water, drowning who knows how many rats; I couldn’t help imagining their screams. Power and water were knocked out below Thirty-ninth Street and in Red Hook, Coney Island, the Rockaways, much of Staten Island. Hospitals were being evacuated after backup generators failed; newborn babies and patients recovering from heart surgery were carried gingerly down flights of stairs and placed in ambulances that rushed them uptown, where the storm had never happened. Houses up and down the coast had been obliterated, flooded, soon a neighborhood in Queens would burn. Emergency workers were fishing out the bodies of those who had drowned during the surge; who knew how many of the homeless had perished? Scores of Chelsea galleries had been inundated and soon the insurers would be welcoming the newly totaled art into their vast warehouses. Alena’s work wasn’t on a ground floor, I remembered; besides, she strategically damaged her paintings in advance; they were storm-proof.
The next day we went to the co-op and bought food to donate—there was a relay set up between the co-op and the Rockaways, in part facilitated by “my” students. We talked constantly about the urgency of the situation, but were still unable to feel it, as the festive atmosphere in the higher-elevation areas of Brooklyn recalled a snow day: parents and kids staying home from work and school, playing in the park; the only visible damage within six blocks of us was a large tree that had crushed an empty car. There were no shortages of food or water in the local stores; the restaurants were full. Everyone we knew was okay; our friends in lower Manhattan had evacuated or, like Alena, were camping out with sufficient supplies. Friends of Alex’s had an apartment flooded with the infinitely filthy water of the Gowanus Canal, but, within our immediate community, that was the upper limit of destruction.
On the second day after the storm I called Sinai to confirm that Alex’s appointment had not been changed; they said nothing at the hospital had been disrupted. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day. There were some buses going into Manhattan from downtown Brooklyn, but the lines were so long, and the routes so confusing, I convinced Alex to let us take a cab. The traffic was slow, but not intolerable; it flowed easily enough once we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into unelectrified lower Manhattan, although we had to treat every intersection as though it had a stop sign, since the traffic lights were out. Police were everywhere, but it seemed more like they were preparing for a parade than dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. Many businesses looked open, although I did see a few dumpsters overflowing with what I assumed were discarded perishables. The streets were relatively empty, as though it were an early Sunday morning. As we progressed north—past intermittent clusters of FEMA, Con Edison, and news trucks—Manhattan shaded rapidly back to normal. Our driver pointed out a crane in the distance above Midtown; it had come loose from a giant condo building during the hurricane and was now dangling precariously above an evacuated block. Other than that, with lower Manhattan behind us, it was a day like any other.
We arrived at the office nearly an hour early, having overestimated how long the journey from Brooklyn would take. We watched—there was no position in the waiting room from which you could avoid watching—the coverage of the storm we kept failing to experience. They spliced Doppler images of the swirling tentacular mass with footage of it reaching landfall, of houses being swept away, of emergency rescues of the elderly. Then the president was talking about the damage, projecting, as they say, leadership; the elections were rapidly approaching. For the first time, national politicians were speaking openly, if obliquely, about extreme weather’s relation to climate change, about the need to storm-proof our cities. Then the governor of New Jersey was surveying damage from a helicopter. I reminded Alex that in 2010 Stephen Hawking claimed the survival of the species depended on moon colonization. She reminded me the Mayan calendar indicated the world would end this coming December 22. She found a New Yorker on the table among the parenting magazines; “I can’t get away from this thing,” she said, moving her jaw around, probably unconsciously, as if it were sore. I thought of Calvin claiming his had thinned from radiation. At least one of the Indian Point reactors had been taken off-line as a result of the storm.
Say that, from a small swivel chair beside the plastic reclining one, I watch as the doctor covers Alex’s stomach
and the sonographic wand with clear gel. The GE Vivid 7 Dimension Ultrasound System is the Rolls-Royce of ultrasound machinery, offering 4-D imaging capabilities along with blood-flow imaging, tissue tracking, and color flow. Normally the sonogram is conducted by a tech, not the doctor herself, but the tech, the doctor explains, lives in the Rockaways—or at least she did before the hurricane. On the flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull. The doctor dwells on the rapidly beating heart, then lets us hear it at high volume. It has only been a couple of months since I heard mine on a similar machine. The heartbeat is strong, she says, perfect, which is welcome news; Alex has had some unexplained bleeding, even some clotting, which we’ve been warned increases the already high rate of miscarriage. Confirming a heartbeat lowers the risk, although the chances the creature will never make landfall remain significant. It will be months before we can look closely at the aorta. As the doctor measures the diameter of the child’s head, I can’t avoid thinking of the baby octopuses. Neither Alex nor I speak, have any questions for the doctor, or take each other’s hand, but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.
