Want Not (23 page)

He’d stared at Maura across the kitchen table. There she was, the woman he’d married seventeen years before, the woman to whom he’d dedicated the lion’s share of his decidedly non-leonine life: that same wheaty hair, same rectangular face and severe mouth, same droopy shoulders, and that same inscrutably flat expression so many people had misconstrued over the years as disapproving or uninterested or bored or dense but that Elwin knew stemmed from her insecurity, a diffidence so crippling that even her facial muscles were bound by it. Or was it her? In the later years of their marriage Elwin had noticed, not with dismay but with begrudging acceptance, his wife seeming to
fade,
both physically and mentally. Every birthday seemed to sap her of more and more color and more and more energy, until, at about the time they’d moved from L.A. to New Jersey, she seemed to have altogether lost her capacity for excitement, developed an immunity to exhilaration, taken on the demeanor of a washed-out watercolor. A natural condition of aging, he’d presumed, or maybe a vitamin deficiency. Yet in the past year something odd and disturbing had happened: her colors (eyes, skin, hair, even her clothes) had grown exotically vivid, her speech more electric, her gestures as dramatic as a silent-movie siren’s. She’d been colorized, remastered with Dolby surround sound, converted to 3D: had morphed into a Pixar version of her former Elwin-ized self. Even the way she was sipping her tea at his table—there was bona fide
gusto
there, as if this was her first-ever taste of Earl Grey and within minutes she’d be describing it with zealous detail in an exclamation-filled diary. Was this the result, Elwin wondered, of addition or subtraction? Meaning: adding Fernando . . . or subtracting Elwin?

“So what do you want?” he finally asked her, when they’d waded through the small talk.

She sighed, and ran a fingertip across the table in a circle. “That’s the problem, El. I think I want everything.”

A long silence, before Elwin asked, “And where does that leave me?”

She shook her head, and for the first time since that 3:30
A.M.
soliloquy he saw a trace of moisture in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. She reached for his hand, but he drew back. “That’s the worst part,” she said. “Not knowing what you want. Or wanting what you can’t have. I don’t—I don’t
know.
”

“So, wacky stuff, huh?” Carrollton was saying.

Elwin startled, realizing he’d just drawn his hand back the way he’d done with Maura. He looked at Carrollton as if Carrollton himself had just tried to hold it. “I’m sorry?”

“The Markers panel,” Carrollton said. “Gotta confess, I figured it was one of my postdocs pranking me when I got the call. But then that spiel . . .” he said, throwing up his hands to denote . . . well, Elwin wasn’t sure what. “Not every day an engineer gets thrown in with Byron Torrance, you know?”

The engineer. Now it made sense, his deprecation of his hands: At some point, Elwin reckoned, he’d given up the blissfully hypnotic tinkering that had led him into engineering, swapped his calipers for class rosters. It’d been the same way for Elwin. At some point he’d gone from actually preserving languages to preserving his various centers for the preservation of languages, to the maintenance of his little sinecures. Of the world’s 6,500 languages, only 600 would survive another generation, and what was Dr. Elwin Cross Jr. doing about it? Eating dinner with potential donors to the Trueblood Center. Sitting still as a pimple through committee meetings. Checking his email. Resisting constant memo pressure from the Dean to “harness social media” to advance the “Trueblood mission.” (Now there was a concept, Elwin thought: using Twitter to stanch the red tide of language death. An idea on a par with arming a militia to combat gun violence.) Informing his father, over and over again, that he was a widower. Studying a diet book whose premise was that portion size, rather than a plague of sapped willpower or sedentariness or high fructose corn syrup or Happy Meals or anything else, was to blame for the fattening of America, and that one could achieve a healthy diet by eating only half of everything and dumping the rest in the trash. At what point, he wondered, had he been forced to devote all his energy, constitutional or not, to mere
existence?

As to Byron Torrance, the subject of what appeared to be starstruck elation from Carrollton, he was a semifamous genome biologist fond of making scientifically imprudent forecasts about the future of humanity. Armed with a Panglossian view and a whizcrack publicist, he regularly plopped himself onto studio couches to spin comforting predictions for basic-cable late-night talk-show hosts. Chief among his theories was that humans were extinction-proof, owing to their ability to manipulate flora and fauna, and that genetic engineering would temper the evolutionary perils of what he deemed an unavoidable (but not calamitous) human monoculture. More prudent scientists, whose books didn’t sell one one-thousandth as many copies as Torrance’s and whose media exposure was limited to alumni-magazine profiles, had already parlayed his name into a verb: to “Torrance” something was to proceed apace on the blithe assumption that everything will work out somehow. George W. Bush, for instance, had “Torranced” the war in Iraq. The mortgage industry, for instance, had “Torranced” the subprime loan market. Dr. Elwin Cross Jr., for instance, had possibly “Torranced” his marriage.

“My first thought, of course,” said Carrollton, “is why the heck are we
burying
this stuff anyway? Well, maybe not
my
first thought . . . my daughter’s, actually. She said to me, ‘Why can’t we just shoot it all into the sun?’ Nineteen-year-olds, you know. They’re all such self-appointed
geniuses.
”

Elwin glanced at the shape of Carrollton’s mouth to confirm the sneer he’d caught in his tone. Carrollton’s children appeared to be a source of acid displeasure, an engineering project gone wrong. “Interesting idea,” said Elwin.

“Yeah, I did some reading on it. It’s an old idea, actually. Main problem is orbital velocity. Turns out it’s awfully hard to get anything to the sun. The better bet, apparently, would be to eject it from the solar system. Just give the stuff a one-way bus ticket, like Giuliani did with the homeless back in the nineties. But then you run into a statistical trap. As in, the one percent failure rate of rockets. Can’t risk a payload of radioactive waste blowing up over Yellowstone. Or Paris. Not to mention the costs involved. Astronomical, pun intended.”

Elwin wasn’t quite ready for this discussion but began anyway, “Well, burial has proven—”

Carrollton cut him off. “Frankly, I like my son’s idea the best. Since radioactive decay emits about two kilowatts of heat, my son (I loved this) says we should bury it underneath the interstates in thick steel containers. No more icy roads. Wouldn’t even need to salt ’em anymore.”

It wasn’t clear whether Carrollton was making fun of his son’s proposal or endorsing it. When Elwin had explained to Christopher his whole warning-future-civilizations-about-buried-nuclear-waste mission, Christopher had cited the radioactive spider bite that’d transformed Peter Parker into Spiderman as a way of questioning the gravity of the whole enterprise. As if to say: Relax, Doc. Maybe there’s an upside to be considered, like super powers. Christopher was clearly a Torrancian. “You’ve got interesting kids,” Elwin offered.

“Yeah,” said Carrollton, not in the least bit scrutably. “Anyway, that issue’s settled. What’s your angle here? I’m just the materials guy, as I understand it. You tell me what kind of marker you’re building, I tell you what to build it out of. Though, personally I’ve a theory that . . . well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be
popular.
”

“Go on,” Elwin said, ignoring Carrollton’s question about his own angle since Carrollton appeared to be ignoring it too.

“What? Oh, sure. So we’ve got a quarter-million barrels of radioactive waste buried in salt flats, two thousand feet below New Mexico. With a ten-thousand-year hazard period. And we’re supposed to devise a marker or marker system to keep people away from this stuff. But what do we know about the deep future? Not squat, right? Will the United States last ten thousand more years? Inconceivable. Will civilization as we understand it last that long? Highly doubtful. But will
humanity
last ten thousand more years? Barring the unthinkable, something like a mega-meteor strike, it seems probable. Genetically modified, maybe, or cybernetically enhanced—whatever.
Homo sapiens.
So there’s your one constant. Human nature.”

“I’m following,” said Elwin. (This whole spiel, he could tell, had been rehearsed as many times as Maura’s 3
A.M.
declaration, not to mention his father’s recurrent questions. The bartender at McGuinn’s had probably called others “big cutie,” too, though he preferred to think otherwise.)

“I got to thinking about this with regard to the pyramids,” Carrollton went on. “That’s one of my areas of research. Four or five years ago we did a microstructural analysis of the Khufu pyramid, figured out there was a geopolymer involved, like cast concrete, and not just cut limestone like everyone’d thought?” The interrogative way he said this suggested the expectation that Elwin might break in at any moment to say, “Of course! Holy shit, that was
you?
” Elwin didn’t. “Got some media notice on that one because it pushed the date of concrete development back by about twenty-five hundred years. Anyway . . .”

“Human nature,” Elwin nudged.

“Right. Well, I went to the pyramids. Thought-wise, I mean. I was thinking about them in terms of engineering, of course. Specifically, what lessons they might offer about protecting the message core of our marker system, whatever it’s going to be. From the elements, vandalism, intrusion, et cetera. But then something . . . something dawned on me. Khufu, right? The Great Pyramid? Khufu was looted by the time of the New Kingdom, let’s say 1500
B.C.
, but probably long before then. So it remained undisturbed for less than a thousand years. King Tut’s tomb, on the other hand, was safe for about thirty-two hundred years. A much better run, if you’re thinking about it in terms of intrusion prevention. So I asked myself what the difference was.”

“What was it?”

“Well. Khufu was
grand.
Khufu was a
monument,
writ large. The greatest wonder of the ancient world. Tut’s tomb, however, was either built over, or flooded over, or used as a dumping ground—it disappeared. It was hidden. No one thought to loot it because it
wasn’t there.
Are you following?”

“Vaguely,” Elwin admitted.

“Yeah, well, that’s where human nature comes in.” Here Carrollton leaned in, lowering his voice. Out of politeness, Elwin leaned in too. “Let’s say it’s the year 5510. Civilization has collapsed, then reemerged. Viral catastrophe, resource depletion, whatever the cause. But humanity has inched its way back, okay? You’re exploring the New Mexico salt flats though the name New Mexico means as much to you as, I don’t know, the Tumulus culture does today. What are you looking for? Doesn’t matter. But you come upon this massive, super-forbidding, intensely
permanent
monolith in the middle of all this nowhere. There’s writing all over it, courtesy of this crackerjack linguist four thousand years earlier (that’s you), but you can’t make sense of it. So what do you do?”

“Curse the linguist, who clearly wasn’t so crackerjack.”

“Bwah! Maybe,” Carrollton said, which Elwin didn’t quite appreciate. “No, look, for starters, here’s what you
don’t
do: You don’t get the heck outta there. Uh-uh. You set up camp and you dig and you pick and pry and poke to try to figure out what’s so damn
important
here. Because clearly, like the pyramids, this site
meant
something to someone. This site had
value.
And because you’re human, you want to know why.”

“Fair enough,” said Elwin.

“Well, there’s my argument.” Here Carrollton paused. Elwin blinked. “You see? We’re talking about building a modern-day Khufu when we might be better off building Tut’s tomb. Building something that isn’t
there.
Put another way, maybe the best marker for all this waste material would be no marker at all. Throw some standard-issue government concrete on it for the short term, let erosion do the rest. Be gone in a century.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Elwin murmured.

“Exactly.”

Elwin weighed this for a while as the plane rose, watching through the window as Newark dropped farther and farther beneath him. The multicolored shipping containers, stacked at Port Elizabeth, looked like a giant circuit board, a teeming matrix of
stuff
parked beside the long charcoal smudge that was Newark Bay. Then the intestinal snarl of roadways south of the Ironbound, as the plane banked westward, and the quilted neighborhoods out toward Scotch Plains and Watchung—then clouds, gray and linty-looking, devouring the view. Elwin turned back to Carrollton.

“Several issues with that,” he said, more brusquely than he’d intended but then something about Carrollton was itching him. “First off, Tut’s tomb
was
opened. Whether it was safe for, what’d you say, a thousand years or three thousand years—that’s a fractional difference.”

Carrollton blew the air from his cheeks. Obviously he’d been hoping to find an ally, seeking to line up support for his do-nothing proposal. “It might be worth noting,” he said, “that it was opened by archaeologists, rather than looters.”

“To some people those would be synonyms,” Elwin said. “Motives aside, the result was fundamentally the same. The tomb was opened, explored, emptied.”

“You have to keep in mind, it’s a theoretical construct—”

“But secondly,” Elwin countered, “there’s a moral component.”

Carrollton frowned.

“The warning, the marker system itself, would seem a moral obligation. Something like the warning label on a pack of cigarettes.”

“Ah huh,” Carrollton said. “But is there anyone who’d argue, realistically, that those warnings are in any way effective?”

“Maybe not. They weren’t to me, thirty years ago. But there’s a strong argument to be made that they’re morally incumbent.”