The Future for Curious People: A Novel (3 page)

“Are you okay?” she asks. “You aren’t making a lot of sense. Are you drunk or something?”

“I mean,” I say, “I’m sorry about not having a better job. I should have paid better attention in college, taken harder classes. You know, really hunkered down with something like premed.” Madge talked me out of being an elementary-school teacher, explaining how much money they make when they hit their salary ceiling.

“Are you going to throw up? You look that same way you did on the subway that time.”

“Just listen,” I say, trying not to raise my voice. “I’m not going to throw up.” Now that I say it, though, I’m not so sure. I feel shaky. I finally take off the mittens. They dangle on the strings. Slowly, I reach into my pocket. “Madge.” My chest tightens. I feel a fiery heat, a certain lightheadedness. “Look, I mean . . .” I manage to say. “Here.” I hand her the box.

Madge opens the box and then shuts it. She’s smiling.

“I was planning on picking you up and spinning you around.” I want to tell her,
Sometimes I wish I could reverse time and start over, from the very beginning—my first wail
. “I feel like passing out.” I sit on the stoop.

“Godfrey,” she says, “listen.” She sits down next to me. “I think we should look into this. Go forward carefully.” She draws out the
carefully,
all three syllables. “You know?”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a yes, kind of. A slow, careful, looking-into-it yes.”

“Okay.”

Madge smiles and puts her arm around my shoulder like a fellow sailor. We are out at sea together, hunting our dinner: giant whales, kraken. Maybe we are in a submarine, sitting on tons and tons of nuclear warheads. Madge finally says, “I thought you’d say no. Funny, huh?”

I am baffled. “Say no? To what exactly? I mean,
I
asked
you.
”

“To looking into it first.”

“Looking into what?”

“Well, I don’t think we should use the same envisionist. It’s like sharing a therapist or something. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Dr. Plotnik and you should see Dr. Chin. I hear he’s very good at giving the total experience. I almost made appointments but decided I should at least wait until you asked first.”

Madge hasn’t put on the ring. It’s still in the box. The box is pretty, but nothing should
stay
in the box. “You’re talking about
envisionists
?” There’s a billboard on the beltway:
DR. CHIN’S ENVISIONING SERVICES. NOW OFFERING: THE FUTURE—FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE.
At the bottom it says, “It’s easier to choose the future, when you’ve seen the options.” And that actor who does all that sci-fi stuff has started doing commercials for some conglomerate that offers discount rates. “No. No way.”

“What? You just said yes!”

“I didn’t know you meant going to envisionists!”

“It’s actual science. You know that, right?” And then Madge napalms me with data. She’s got an incredible ability to memorize stuff. There’s nothing I can do but sit back and take it. “Each human being has vast untapped mental abilities. Our eyes take in some twelve million pieces of information every second while in that same second, our ears are processing one million pieces of information, touch is bringing in five hundred thousand data points per second, smell is only bringing in seventy bits of information and taste is only registering about fifteen info bits per second, but look, Godfrey, do you know how many pieces of sensory information that is per second?”

“You know I don’t know,” I say. Does she think I’ve been running a mental calculator? Are we still even talking about marriage?

“That’s approximately thirteen million five hundred thousand eighty-five pieces of sensory information per second. And those are just the senses alone. There’s also all the deep tissue of long-term memory and the chemical processing of short-term data and the processing of intangible information as each of these senses is synthesized to produce thought, action, reaction.”

“That’s a lot of knowledge.” If I agree with her, maybe I can reroute the conversation back to marriage more quickly.

“And then that Scandinavian researcher figured out that if we could process information without the interference of the subconscious’s absurdism and emotion—vengefulness, greed, hope, faith, hatred, and most of all
love,
which blurs
everything
we perceive”—she seems really annoyed by the blurriness caused by love—“and add that to what we know from the past, we could predict our own future outcomes, in minute detail.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, feeling a little like crying.

“We know,” she says. “Our brains know so much more than we ever let them!”

“I get it.” I barely get it.

“The drug cocktail that Percel created puts the patient into a short kind of awake-REM state, cuts out the white noise of emotions, and allows the person to predict a specific potential future. And then, this is the best part, Godfrey. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I say, a little defensively.

“This guy named Bacon figured out how to digitize that dreamlike state—capturing the synapses—for viewing. See how perfect it is? It’s a real tool, but it doesn’t come from out there, Godfrey.” She straightens her arms and waves her hands at the world. “It comes from in here.” She taps her forehead and then my forehead. “Each of us is brilliant, Godfrey. See? So don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m not selling myself short! I asked you to
marry
me. Remember?”

“Look. This is my one request. Envisionists. It’s the only smart thing to do.”

“If people can really tell the future, why do they muck around with people’s relationships? Call the next Super Bowl! Put a fix on the stock market!”

“Godfrey, envisioning is overseen by the FCC. Do you really think that they’d let people broadcast futures that would infringe on commerce? There are tons of regulations.”

“Really. The FCC.” I didn’t know this.

“They only have the matchmaking software at this point, but they’re working on the regulatory issues around other futures, like career paths. They worry it might have unforeseen ramifications on the economy if everyone suddenly decides to ditch med school and go into investment banking for the cushy lifestyle.”

“Right. Investment banking. I probably should have considered that more closely. And we need doctors, too. I mean, who will outfit the investment bankers with pacemakers when their tickers start to fail.”

“Don’t be caustic.”

“I’m not being caustic! Doctors are important! Pacemakers save lives!”

“Well, it really worked out great for Bart and Amy! You can’t deny that. They both saw fantastic futures. Incredible. I mean, I don’t know how they come up with all that money. I told my parents and my father was like, wow, you should invite them to the cabin.” Madge’s parents own a ski-in, ski-out cabin in Colorado I’ve yet to be invited to.

“Like I want to hear about Bart and Amy right now.” I’ve already heard all of this from Bart. Their future entails tennis whites and healthy grandchildren, plus a thick head of white hair for Bart. Before I met Madge, Bart met Amy and now my Bart is gone. I love Bart and I always will, but sometimes I worry he’s turned into a gossip who sometimes wears various kinds of facial hair—with irony. I shake my head. “I
proposed
to you. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Don’t get all heated up,” Madge says.

“Don’t get all heated up?” I squeeze my head with both hands. “I asked you to marry me, and you want to look into it first? Look into it first?” Everything’s sinking in.

“You’re the one with a father who isn’t your biological father because your biological father was a married man at the time he and your mom—”

“I don’t want to drag Mart Thigpen into this.” This is no secret. At age eleven, my mother sat me down and told me that my real father was not Aldo Burkes, the father I’d known all my life, but this other man named Mart Thigpen. A married man. A married man who was a connoisseur of thighs, who had sex with many women, including my mother, but always went back to his wife, which meant he left my mother high and dry! “High and dry, Godfrey!” she said, and I imagined her on a hill in the desert in a boat. She warned me that I was doomed to become a man like Mart Thigpen—a man I’ve never met. I’m his son, his animal son, and that I had to fight against it.

My mother now rescues bunnies that people drop off at animal shelters. She has a yard full of hutches hand built by the Amish. Her saving once-loved pet bunnies that have been abandoned is an obvious metaphor for Gloria Burkes saving Gloria Burkeses.

“You bring up your dark fear of your animal nature all the time!” Madge says.

This is true, if overstated a little. I do have this fear that I might become an alcoholic who might even do cocaine in a public restroom, which is one small detail that my mother told me about Mart Thigpen. Lord God, how many years did I have a fear of public restrooms because of my weak predilection for cocaine? How many months did I spend as a sophomore in high school, practicing rolling single dollar bills my mom gave me for morning milk into sniffable straws because I figured I should prepare for the inevitable! “Is that why you’re afraid to say yes? Because you’re afraid of what I might become?”

Madge smiles. “Oh, Godfrey. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not afraid that you’re going to turn into a wildly lustful seducer of women? You’re no animal. You’re no Mart Thigpen.”

“Thanks,” I say. I know Madge is mocking me, but truth is, I can trust Madge’s opinion which is important because I can’t trust my own—half Thigpen that I am. “This is about you and me. Marriage is a leap of faith. Don’t you believe in leaps of faith?” I ask.

Madge shakes her head. “I love you. You know that.”

“And I love you, too, Madge.” Here are more things I love about Madge: the way she talks with her hands as if carving air and laughs so hard she snorts and believes in helping others hence her job at the downtown clinic and how she knows all the lyrics to the Kinks and talked me out of a bad tattoo.

“We love each other,” she says. “We can survive taking our time.”

“You’re not going to put the ring on, are you? This is conditional. That’s what you’re saying. I do it your way or it doesn’t happen.” I swing my arms around angrily and the mittens come flapping after them. I try to pull the mittens off, but the clips seem permanently clenched. I use the voice I usually reserve for customer service personnel. It’s the only way I can stop myself from further losing it. “If you aren’t going to put the ring on, you should give it back. That’s customary, isn’t it?”

She tightens her grip on the box and refuses to look at me. She looks at everything but me.

“Do you know how ridiculous we look right now?” I am saying this, but my mouth is barely moving.

She doesn’t answer, doesn’t move.

“What? Do you want me to wrestle that box from you?” I’m trying to joke now, but it’s not going over.

Madge is breathing hard. The steam is rising from her mouth into the cold air. It is her pre-cry panting. I am softening or melting or both.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
Once when Madge’s parents were in town, they pulled me aside and her mother said, “Madge has had a very affirmed childhood. We want her to spend her life with someone who truly appreciates everything about her. Everything.”

“Everything?” I said.

Her father then said, “Madge’s affirmed childhood was her mother’s idea. It makes her a force of nature. All that affirmation and no real failure for her to apply it to? Well, it’s all bottled up. It’s a force field, Godfrey. Good luck.”

I don’t want to give in. I stiffen up and try to sound definitive. If I had a necktie on, I’d straighten the shit out of it. “I’m not going to look into our future, Madge. I’m not. It goes against everything I believe in.”

She looks up at me. “You have a belief system?”

I nod weakly. “I think I do.” I look around the street, the row of trees buckling the sidewalk. “I’m pretty sure I do.”

My boss, Mr. Gupta, walks over to me behind the desk in Youth Services. He’s typically bookish. His shoulders slope toward a doughy center. The fuzz of his sweaters seems to have molded to his body. And of course he’s wearing bifocals. He was raised in India and therefore has no tolerance for whining of any kind—even the completely valid inner-city Baltimore variety. Much less if you try to tell Gupta that you don’t want people eating out of the take-out box you put in the communal fridge for lunch on the grounds that it’s unsanitary to co-eat from take-out boxes, he’ll say, “Oh, please. Afraid of a few germs? In India people just die on the streets. You step over bodies. It’s just how it is!”

But today he doesn’t have his normal bravado. “Evelyn Shriner,” he says, as he often refers to me by my full name. “The woman in the bathroom on the third floor is dying her hair in the sink.” Fadra is a homeless woman who’s been living in the library—for all intents and purposes—for a couple of years. She has the strange habit of bringing up the fine art of taxidermy at certain moments when she feels attacked and with a glint in her eye that makes me feel like a muskrat about to be stuffed and boxed in a small display case. “I just feel like dying your hair is really bold,” Gupta says. “A new
level
of bold. I need you to go talk to her.” Gupta shrugs apologetically and then makes a shooing motion with his hands, flipping them forward on the hinges of his wrists.

“Mr. Gupta,” I say politely. “Wouldn’t that be Cherelle’s area?” The library is a carefully organized landscape of territories drawn by a group of carefully organized human beings. I reside in Youth Services. (I should note that I’m the whitey minority in this library, which means I sometimes don’t get the jokes.) It’s as if the third floor is an arctic region clearly out of my domain. Plus, I’d like to pawn this off on Cherelle because I’m scared of Fadra. This is why Gupta himself isn’t going in after her.

Gupta shakes his head vehemently. “There was the incident,” Gupta says, pushing up his glasses, “as you well know. And Cherelle has become a little nervous, you know. I’ll never understand it, but she can no longer confront others. Personally, it strikes me as an American privilege to suddenly claim your nerves are shaken. Still, I have to be
sensitive
or they will send me back for another training session. I deplore sensitivity training sessions, Evelyn Shriner. They make me completely insensitive!”

A few weeks ago, Cherelle, who grew up in this area of Baltimore—which isn’t the safest part of town—is very tough and officious woman, but she accidentally aided and abetted a criminal who’d just held up a liquor store and was looking for the best way to catch a bus to Philly. Cherelle was exceedingly thorough, the man was truly grateful, and she’d felt good about the whole thing until the cops showed up.

I look around at my little protected area of the library—my nest of Youth Services. I point to the group of teenagers, a brilliant group of kids, all in all—the oddballs that gather, as I once did and then stayed on . . . “I can’t leave now. We’re about to start the book club meeting,” I say. This is actually a ways off. “Right, Keisha? You need me to be here, correct?”

Keisha says, “If it weren’t for you, I’d be doing meth in an IHOP bathroom. Of course we need you here.”

I wasn’t expecting this. I feel all warm in my heart. “Really?” I say.

“No, of course not,” Keisha says. “That shit short-circuits the pleasure part of your brain, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

I turn to Gupta. “It
is
the thought that counts. Clearly.” I lower my voice. “And she probably read about the bad effects of meth here in the Youth Services area of the library.”

“This is a beautiful moment,” Gupta says, just lightly laced with sarcasm. “I’m choked up.”

“Can’t Chuck go?” Chuck is our deputy sheriff, a sweet man with an overly large head. He has to special order his cop caps. His young offspring are similarly large-headed.

“He and I would both go, but it is the
women’s
room,” Gupta says. “Look, I will stand here while your book club starts to talk about the book and you won’t be gone long.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, feeling screwed over by my own gender.

Gupta smiles, chin to chest. “May the force be with you, Evelyn Shriner.”

I head to the elevators, wringing my hands. This wasn’t what I thought my job would entail when I first went into library studies, but I love my job. I truly do.

Libraries are my homeland. So, yes, I tried to make Adrian’s family my own—one popover at a time—and his family wasn’t the first, but I also chose a career that would land me in a place I could call home. When you grow up in the deadened air of loss, you get used to quiet, but you never get used to the loneliness of living with parents who are despairing. As a kid, I went to the library because, in books, there were people really living lives, and
un
like my parents, they talked to me about important things. My own house was austere, hushed, and dusty like a library, but once you understand that each book on the shelf has a heartbeat, then you’ll want to stay. I don’t tend dead things—paper, ink, glue bindings. I tend books the way someone in an aviary tends birds.

Bookstores, on the other hand, can make me nervous. All those books and I can’t possibly buy them all and tend to them properly, love them enough, give them the eyes they deserve. But, here, at the library, the patrons take the books out as a kind of foster care program—into the world and back again.

If they don’t come back? Well, some books are meant to live in the wilds. There’s not much you can do about that.

But nowadays libraries are in many ways the last public space. Robert Frost defined home as “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” Ditto public libraries. Our doors are open—to everyone. In the summer, kids are dropped off here to spend the entire day. Some really little ones manage a city bus route. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s sometimes overwhelmingly sad, and yet they’re here. They aren’t on the streets.

Just this morning, I got to help an old woman trying to find a book that she’d read in her childhood. She didn’t remember the title or the author, but knew it was about a panda. When I showed her the cover on my screen, she said, “Yes, yes, that’s it! My father read it to me once and cried at the end. It was the only time I’d ever seen him cry.” Books can break a man open, even ones about a panda, maybe especially so.

I love the smell of books, the dust motes spiraling in sun. I love shelves and order. I love the carts and metal stools on wheels. I love the quiet carrels and the study rooms. I love the strobing of copy machines, the video and audio bins. I love the Saturday morning read-alouds for kids and how they try to hush when they come in; all these books can still demand a bit of awe. I love the teen reading groups, clutching books to their chests, little shields protecting them from the world’s assaults—those are my people. I even love the homeless shuffling in—it’s warm here with running water, safe—and the couples who make out in the stacks. I don’t blame them: books are sexy after all.

If Chin’s office did, in fact, bring in career envisioning, I wouldn’t need it. I’m happy here. One day, I could have Gupta’s job, overseeing the place—like head zookeeper of all the bookish heartbeats.

As the elevator sends me up, I imagine Fadra as an auntie of mine—the eccentric kind that my family doesn’t possess.

I pause in front of the women’s room door on the third floor. I hear the hand blower going and Fadra singing what sounds like Janis Joplin. Was Fadra a hippy at some point? I steel myself, brush back my bangs, and walk in.

Fadra is in the final stage of the process, her bright red hair flipped upside down under the hand blower, which she must have pushed on many, many times because the entire bathroom is warm. She doesn’t hear me walk in. Her hair dye box and latex gloves are in one of the sinks, its basin tinged a pinkish red.

“Fadra!” I call out.

Her head snaps around and then she flips it over. It’s impossible to tell how old she is. Her face looks old and her teeth make her look ancient. Her new brash hair color makes her face, by contrast, look older still. But her body moves quickly, like her bones are young.

“What?” she says innocently.

“You can’t dye your hair in here.”

“That’s not written down anywhere.”

“I think that’s because no one ever thought that someone would dye their hair in here.”

“People dye their hair at the bus station bathroom.”

“This isn’t the bus station bathroom.”

“Well, I can do it!” Fadra says. “I already did it.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have the ability to dye your hair in here. Obviously, you’ve proven you can. I’m saying you’re not allowed — in the future, okay?”

“I don’t like it when you talk to me like this.” She curls her hands in and looks at her fingernails and I know what’s coming.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t go to your dark place.”

“I used to have bone-cutter forceps and ear openers and gooseneck hide stretchers and—”

“I’m serious, Fadra! I do not want to hear about your previous life in the world of taxidermy!”

“I once created a little scene of Canadian squirrels having sex in a little handmade canopy bed,” she says, which strikes me as oddly tender for Fadra, borderline sentimental. “Taxidermy is Greek for arrangement of skin.”

“I know. You’ve told me this before. And I don’t like the way you talk about taxidermy because I think you’re purposefully giving the impression that you want to kill me and stuff me and stitch me up and put me in some weird display. It gives off a very creepy vibe and it feels like bullying.” We talk about bullying all the time in Youth Services and I can’t help that it pops out of my mouth, but as soon as I see Fadra’s reaction, I know I’ve gone too far.

“You’re going to kick me out. Aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not kicking you out.” We had to kick her out once. She had a screaming fit in the audio section, in which she told Gupta that she’d stuff his “Gandhi ass.” Gupta did not like the reference to his ass looking like Gandhi’s.

“I don’t touch the books, you know,” Fadra shouts. “I never do! I never mess with your stuff !”

“You’re supposed to touch the books, Fadra. We’ve been over this. This is a library.”

“I don’t like to read because it takes me to other places. I’m trying to just be where I am. Inside my own self.” I can appreciate this in a Buddhist kind of way. “You can’t
make
me
read the books!”

“You have to clean up in here. Okay? And don’t do it again. Gupta really wasn’t happy about it.”

“Gupta can poop in a hole!”

“No, let’s not rev up again, Fadra. Okay? Just calm it down.”

“Okay, okay,” she says, “but I’m going to be me. You know that. Nothing anyone can do. I’m going to be me. You’re going to be you. Gupta’s going to be Gupta.”

This feels like a compromise that I can accept—like the terms of some abstract peace accord. I say, “Agreed!” and I’m about to leave because there’s not much more I can do here, but then I stop. “Question: Do you think that our nature defines us or is it just our circumstances? Or is it something else? I mean, what did you mean that each of us is going to be ourselves?”

She looks at me like I’m a child. “All I got is who I am. You have any more than that?”

I think of José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher. “This famous thinker once said, ‘Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.’ ”

“Ha!” Fadra says, looking at me sharply. “Are you still yearning? I thought you’d grown up already.”

Is that what it means to grow up? Is the payment for adulthood an end to yearning? I’m flustered suddenly. It’s like someone’s lifted up the dirty wall-to-wall carpeting of life and revealed some ugly truth. “Uh, just don’t dye your hair in here anymore,” I say.

“I’ll try not to,” she says, but, she is who she’s going to be, I guess.

“And no more taxidermy talk, okay?”

She stares at me. This she can’t promise, and I have to respect that.

“Okay,” I say. As soon as the bathroom door swings shut behind me, I hear the hand blower rev up.

I’VE SIGNED UP TO
volunteer to record books for the blind in the back room of Special Collections. After my shift ends, this is where I’m headed.

The visitors to Special Collections are as rare as the collections themselves: boxes of African American sheet music, war posters, rare books sheathed in protective wrappings, and my favorite—postcards, thirty-three boxes full of them, taking up twelve linear feet of shelving, most of them inscribed by the dead to the dead.

I have to borrow a key to get into the Special Collections room by Jason Binter, who’s only here as a sub because Rita fell in love and joined the Peace Corps. Binter’s no genius, and how he ended up in library work is a ponderous mystery. But he has a lightly aged frat-boy look—without the date-rape vibe—and I’m eyeing him for a future.

He sits in the sign-in room in Special Collections—a little glass room—as if Binter himself is the true rarity on display. I knock on the glass and he looks up a little dumbfounded. Is it because he was deep in thought or surprised to find himself in his surroundings, as if his life is a process of finding himself places he doesn’t expect to be? Hard to say.

I smile and wave the apologetic sorry-to-interrupt half-hand crumple wave.

He nods and waves me in.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m here to volunteer. You know. Recording for the blind.” I lift my digital recorder and paperback as proof. I’m not going to lie: I want the points that come along with being the type of person who volunteers to record books for the blind.

“You’re a good citizen,” Binter says, and it strikes me as the kind of thing that might only be a hot come-on to a communist, speaking in a boozy Russian accent. Could this be Binter’s attempt at flirtation? I know, I know, this is a stretch, but librarian flirtation can be very subtle. He pulls a key from a desk drawer, unlocks the door for me.