The Future for Curious People: A Novel (23 page)

The sun wakes me up and I slip out of Bart and Amy’s apartment as quickly as I can. I’m so quiet it’s as if I ghosted through the front door, down the two flights of circular stairs, and into my frost-covered car. I’ve got shit to do.

I put the key into the ignition and let the car warm up. I turn up the defroster. I count to sixty. Twice. I pull away from the curb. I take a left and head toward the suburban sprawl of the outskirts of Baltimore. I’m going to Chin’s.

Evelyn was right. I should see my future with my father. Mart Thigpen.

I wonder if Evelyn has gotten the singing telegram yet. It’s bolder, more romantic, more clever than any text message could ever be. I remind myself to stay positive, to show a little bravado, to hope for the best. I’m making decisions from the heart here. That should count for something.

Dr. Chin’s is packed. This early? Why? Not a single chair is available. Patients are glued against the two far walls like wallpaper. The office is hot, not from the heating system as much as the amount of skin in such a cramped space. Can all of these people have appointments?

I make my way to the receptionist window. Lisa is behind the glass. She’s always here, behind the glass. Briefly, I feel very sorry for her. Her bangs are damp, clumped against her forehead from sweat. I’m the sixth person in line.

I think of Evelyn. This is where we first met. I look down at my feet. Maybe this exact spot. No, it was closer. We were at the window because she was talking to Lisa. Evelyn held her driver’s license between her teeth. I should’ve kissed her then, in line. I should’ve taken the driver’s license out of her mouth with my teeth, and followed her home to her giant bed and shelves stacked with Modest Mouse and Cat Power records. I should have known.

Soon enough I’m standing directly in front of Lisa. Only the glass is between us. I never noticed how thick the glass was. It looks bulletproof, which wouldn’t surprise me. Desperate patients who haven’t been able to get appointments are bound to raise hell. And for the first time I notice that the chairs have mismatched upholstery and some of the legs are chipped and the walls are pocked with small dents. Is this the result of patients losing it, throwing chairs and chucking them into the walls? If so, I get it. I look at Lisa. “I need an appointment today,” I say. “Yesterday would’ve been better, but today will have to do.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Lisa actually guffaws. “You’ve seen the waiting room, right?” She points to a group of hopeful patients in the far corner. Some of them are holding white cone paper cups in their hands, sipping slowly, while others just sway back and forth. If I strain my ears, I can hear teeth chatter.

I turn back around. I nod. “They’re the Desperates,” Lisa says. She leans forward in her swivel chair. It creaks. Her voice drops to a hush. I have to strain to hear her. She shakes her head. “Poor bastards.” She leans back in the swivel chair.

The teeth chattering. The swaying. Those white cone cups that aren’t thick enough for the cold water so they melt in your hands. Aren’t I better than they are? I press my hands against the bulletproof glass that separates her from the rest of us. “I need this,” I say. It comes out as a hiss.

Lisa wags her finger before reaching for something under her desk. She pulls out a sign, handwritten on orange construction paper:
DO NOT TOUCH GLASS
. I drop my hands to my sides. I can feel my voice start to rise, which is awkward, because my hands are still at my sides. I want to be animated, but I’m not allowed. “Can you smell me?” I say. “I’m probably the only thing that can cut through the shitty scent of egg rolls and dirty woks. Go ahead, ask me the last time I brushed my teeth. Things are not going well—at all!”

“Twenty bucks,” Lisa whispers.

“What?” I have to blink to focus on her.

“Idiot, I’m asking for a bribe.”

I reach into my back pocket and pull out my wallet. I don’t expect there to be any money when I open it, but there’s one bill. I don’t know how it got there. Maybe Bart slipped it in when I wasn’t looking. God bless that poor bastard. It’s a twenty. I pinch Andrew Jackson’s face between my index finger and thumb.

“Now slide it to me,” she says. “Slowly and carefully.”

I do.

Lisa folds it up into four tiny squares and sticks it in her bra. Her hands find the keyboard on her desk and she starts typing. “Have a seat, Mr. Burkes,” she says, not looking at me. Her fingers are still moving. “A nurse will be with you shortly.”

I turn away from the glass window and look around the waiting room. I lean against a wall with the rest of the patients until my name is called. I follow a nurse all the way to the end of the hallway. There’s a back door, which is a fire exit.
EMERGENCY USE ONLY
, the sign says. I didn’t know that Chin’s office went this far back. The nurse stops. I stop with her. I look at the number above the room: 19. Maybe this is where the deep fryer was when this was a Chinese restaurant. She sets a paper gown on the chair before leaving. Even though it’s stuffy in Chin’s, I’m cold. I change quickly.

Moments later, two knocks on the door before Dr. Chin lets himself in. “An emergency envisioning,” he says, and he looks like his night was hellish, too. He’s bleary-eyed, rushed, distracted.

“I’m on a mission,” I tell him. “I’m broke, I smell, and my fiancée might be telling my girlfriend that I have a fiancée. I don’t have time for idle conversation.”

Dr. Chin says, “It’s bad all around, Godfrey. No one is spared their personal grief.” My hands are folded in my lap. My face is staring straight at the blank screen.

“I’m here for my father,” I say. “I know it’s not a romantic request, but I’ve heard that maybe you can find a loophole, and love is love and—”

Chin cuts me off. “Do you know what I sell?”

“Um, the future?”

“I sell a comfort. There’s one fear that most people want allayed. It comes from a simple question: ‘Is it always going to be like this?’ ”

“Like what?”

“Like whatever fearful, anxious, vulnerable, specific lives they find themselves in. And it doesn’t matter what future I show them because all they really want to hear is, ‘No, it’s not always going to be like this.’ Anyone who’s the least bit unhappy wants to hear this, Godfrey. And that’s what I sell. Not futures and surely not
better
futures. I just sell an answer: ‘No, it’s not always going to be like this.’ ” Chin squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his big head. “Is that so wrong?”

“No?” I say.

“That’s right!” Chin says. “That’s not wrong at all!” It seems like I’ve said the right thing because Chin walks to the computer. “I can try to swing it. It’ll be a moment that still has to do with your romantic future, though. That’s locked in, but I’ll have it circle around your father.”

“Perfect,” I say. “Thank you.”

“I need Mr. Burkes’s first name.”

“No, my real father. Mart Thigpen. Ten years into the future. I don’t want him to be dead, you know?” I think of my mother—the rabbits, the pool. Evelyn. It’s easy to think of Evelyn.

“Thigpen,” Chin says. “Thigpen, the animal.” He’s leaning over the keyboard, typing Mart Thigpen’s name into the computer. I watch each letter of my father’s name fill the screen.

“I’m surprised you remembered.” I put on the helmet. I pretend to be in a spaceship. I pretend this is all a game—it’s easier that way, nothing to let you down.

“A doctor never forgets,” Chin says, and then he types in thirty years even though I told him only ten, which casts doubt on Chin’s theory on the steel-trap memories of doctors. He slides the tray of pills over to where I’m sitting. I think about correcting him. Thirty years is a long time. The world could be dead in thirty years. I haven’t seen the Al Gore documentary, but I think that’s what he says in it. He hands me the pills. “You know I was training on the better equipment. I wanted to make it more surgical. When to enter the future to give you the answer to an exact question . . . Oh well.”

“You’d have to know the right question, though, right?” I pop the pills.

“The right question is always more important than the answer.”

“Then why even get the new technology?”

“I’ll miss you, Godfrey,” he says.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know,” Chin says, and with a sad mysterious smile, he walks out.

As the medication rolls the fog in over my eyes, I think of the Pixies’ song:
If man is five . . . the devil is six.
Out loud I finish the line, “Then God is seven.”

I stare at the screen. The camera opens on future-me. I’m sitting on a bench. In thirty years, my hands still aren’t pruned. My face isn’t too sagged. I’m quite handsome. I take this as a good sign—I’m taking care of myself, which means I’m probably happy. The camera slowly pans out. An old man is sitting next to future-me on the bench. A walker rests in front of him. The old man is Mart Thigpen. His face is smeared, but his body is the shape of a retired mobster. Or maybe a linebacker from a Division III college team. The years have hunched his shoulders. Gravity’s constant pull has shortened him. Baldness found him. I find his lack of hair disconcerting. I wonder when it started. I instinctively start to reach up to touch my hair, but it hits the helmet. I always forget the helmet. I focus back on the screen. The bench is outside, but it’s not at a park. I can’t pinpoint the location until I hear waves crash into themselves. I look at the bottom of the screen. There’s sand around our shoes. It’s caked onto the rusted legs of the bench, years of salty air eroding the metal.

I study my father. Mart Thigpen rubs his thinned out ankles. He’s wearing thin white tube socks with black loafers, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a small rectangular pocket. The camera pans out and I can see the coastline, the roughness of the waves. I think it’s the Atlantic.

My father uses the walker for support as he slowly pushes himself off the bench. But even with the walker, he still wobbles. Future-me grabs his right elbow to steady him. When future-me curls his hand around my father’s thin bicep, I catch a glimpse of a silver wedding band on my left ring finger.

In thirty years, I’m married. Does this mean things work out with Evelyn? Do I get to her before Madge does? Or maybe I’ve been freaking out about nothing, and Madge doesn’t even have my phone. Maybe I lucked out and a bondagey woman stole it but left my wallet out of kindness. Right now she could be prank-calling parts of Canada and Argentina and Sweden, running up my phone bill before selling the phone for scraps on eBay. I can live with that. I mean, I’m married! And my father is still alive in thirty years! I am feeling optimistically petrified.

Still, nothing has been said. I wonder where we’re going. Is my father deaf ? If so, why wouldn’t I learn sign language to talk with him?

The way the two of us walk down the paved path horizontal to the ocean looks rehearsed, like this is a normal thing. Maybe a Sunday morning ritual, before or after bagels and the
New York Times
—if newspapers somehow still exist—at the corner deli, sitting in the same booth—the one in the corner closest to the bathroom because Mart has to pee
all the time.

Abruptly, the two of us turn left and head straight for the ocean. I find this surprising. I’m in slacks and Mart’s in shorts and socks. Are we going in?

We can’t be going into the water, can we? I help him take off his shoes and then take off my own.

My father’s gripping the walker with both hands. Future-me is right by his side—my hand is curled again around my father’s bicep. He pushes the walker awkwardly but with determination through the sand.

Is future-me taking my father into the ocean to drown him? Is that why we aren’t talking—a quiet understanding that it’s time to go? Is Mart Thigpen sick? Is this a tepid excuse for family to get together? Am I about to shout out,
Hey, kids, come to the ocean! We’re drowning Grandpa!
The optimism is gone. I could vomit.

We are
definitely
going into the ocean. The waves roll up to our knees. My pants are soaked. We have both forgotten how to speak. The camera is in shaky-cam mode now as it follows future-me and my father as he pushes his walker slowly into the tide.

Can someone this old swim? Their bellies are often bigger than when they’re young, so maybe they float, like citrus. The camera cuts. Now the view is from the ocean shore, with the lens of the camera pointing up. My father and future-me look like giants. Maybe slow giant sloths. Mart Thigpen in his eighties, pushing a walker through bleached sand. Mild grunts. Slowly trudging into the ocean.

Every few seconds a wave crashes up over the lens. Each time, I want to hit the side of the TV, as if it’s a static issue from the 1960s. But I don’t get out of my chair. The helmet wouldn’t let me if I tried.

Is this the moment of precipice?

And then the session is interrupted by a short commercial from Earl Chin, Esquire. “He’ll stand up for
you
!” Earl smiles with his hands crossed, looking tough but smart and stern.

Then a jellyfish washes up with the tide. In thirty years, there are still jellyfish. Finally future-me stops. He’s up to his hips in the ocean. My father hands him the walker. Future-me reaches out and grabs it.

My father says, “What do you think happened?”

“The girls grew up,” I say. “The house was suddenly too empty.” Am I talking about Evelyn? Did something go wrong with us? “Now that we aren’t parents to the girls, who are we? Do we even need each other?”

“Now more than ever,” my father says, the waves pushing both of us, relentlessly.

Future-me says, “Are you going to tell me what to do?”

“I regret so much in my life,” my father says. “I should’ve fought for you. If I had, I wouldn’t have felt so weighted down.” And then, with a final heave forward, my father is buoyant. He moves slowly like a sea turtle. “Go home and fight for her!” he shouts over the waves. “Fight like hell!”

And with that, he glides through the water, bobs over a wave, and keeps swimming. He’s got a very smooth breaststroke.