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“What kind of gum is this?” I asked.

It took him a while to look at me. He smiled. “Nicotine gum.” That's why I was a little nauseated. It was strong. I didn't spit it out: it was one of the few things connecting us.

“Are you quitting?”

“No, but my mom bought me a ton of this at Christmas.”

“How is stuff going beyond poetry?” I felt I could ask, after the mention of family.

“Well, you said once that we shouldn't worry about our literary careers, should worry about being underwater.” I must have been joking around in class—half joking. “And in any new civilization you need those who have a sense of usable history and can reconstruct at least the basic concepts from science. Also there is the literalization of all literature because the sky is falling, if you know what I mean—that's no longer just a phrase. A lot of people can't handle it, how everything becomes hieroglyphic. I lost my girlfriend over that. Body without organs, for instance. I can swallow but there is a cost to swallowing in the sense that I don't have the same kind of throat. That's a metaphor but it has real effects, which is what she couldn't understand. What's tricky is you want to test it, take poison or whatever to show how you can absorb it, but you don't know in that instance if it will be symbolic or spider out.”

The college did not have good psychiatric services. He was twenty-six; no one could force him to get help or even legally contact his parents, whoever they were.

“Nobody thinks we've been told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you're buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this”—here he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow's peak; I wasn't sure—“that wasn't there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, can feel that when it clicks, but I can't afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names
before
they form. The World Meteorological Organization's Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee—I looked it up. And ever since I looked it up I can't get service on my phone. Every call is just dropped.”

“I agree it's a crazy time,” I said. “But I think in times like these we have to try to stay connected to people. And we have to try to make our own days, despite all the chaos. We have to focus on feeling comfortable in our own skin, and we need to be open to getting help with that.” I was desperately trying to channel my parents.

“Exactly. And the skin is where a lot of the information is entering now. The pores. The pores are the poets of the skin. Who said that? And people try to seal them, silence them. I guess I did. My girlfriend would seal the pores on her face with egg whites and other shit and she'd have no idea where that was coming from, even if the companies say all natural or organic. Why do you think they sell so much makeup at airports? They don't need to test them on animals; they have supercomputers that can basically feel pain at this point. It's like molecular caulking but you're not going to keep particles out that way and you're just shutting yourself off from the social. From what's coming.”

“Calvin”—I spoke slowly—“a lot of the things you're saying aren't really making sense to me.” Was that true? “I get the feeling you've been really stressed. This is a stressful place, a stressful time. Sounds like you're going through a breakup. I often feel really worn out when I've been spending a lot of time trying to write.” He looked at me with hurt surprise. “I'm wondering if you're seeing anyone or maybe could consider seeing somebody. Just to talk through things.”

“Okay, wow. Wow. You want to pathologize me, too. I guess that's your job. You represent the institution. The institution speaks through you. But let me ask you something”—I sized Calvin up physically; he was taller than I was, nearly as tall as the protester, but thin, almost lanky; I involuntarily visualized punching him in the throat if he attacked me—“can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there's poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren't man-made, even if they're now out of the government's control? You don't think the FBI is fucking with our phones? The language is just becoming marks, drawings of words, not words—you should know that as well as anybody. Or are you on drugs? Are you letting them regulate you?” He stood up so suddenly I flinched, then felt bad for flinching. “Sorry for wasting your time,” he said, maybe holding back tears, and stormed out of my office, forgetting his legal pad.

How would Whitman have tended such an illness, what gifts would he have distributed? No sides, no uniforms, no nation to be forged out of the suffering. I did the things one does, the institution speaking through me. I e-mailed my closest colleagues and the chair about my concerns and asked for advice. I e-mailed two students I thought were friends with Calvin and asked if they'd been in touch with him lately, without saying why. Then I e-mailed Calvin to say I was sorry if I'd upset him, but I was concerned about him and wanted to be of whatever help I could. I did not say that our society could not, in its present form, go on, or that I believed the storms were in part man-made, or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI fucks with citizens' phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true. And that my mood was regulated by drugs. And that sometimes the language was a jumble of marks.

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.”