The Future for Curious People: A Novel (4 page)

“Zank you, comrade,” I say, in a pseudo Russian accent, even though the Russian thing is something that only existed in my head.

“Comrade?” he says curiously. I duck my head and shuffle past him and close the door.

I sit at a desk, find my place in the book, and take a moment to collect myself. I’m supposed to pick books that haven’t been masterfully recorded already, but I always end up recording another version of a classic. Look, I’m a volunteer so I figure I should be allowed to read what I want. Today I’m working on
Th
e Great Gatsby.

I’m reading about Mrs. Wilson at the party, after she changes her dress and how she seems to almost balloon into a different person. She expands and the room shrinks until it’s like she’s “revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.”

I stop the recording right there. My hand shaking a little because I know she’s going to die. She’s going to be hit by a car. And then Gatsby’s going to be shot to death in his swimming pool.

And, again, I think of my sister on her bicycle with its banana seat. Megan. A twelve-year-old girl I’ll never know. I imagine the car, though I don’t know what kind it was. I imagine a large bulky automobile, something that’s slow to start, slow to stop. It careens toward her. Her death will kill something inside of my parents. Figuratively, they’ll float like two dead bodies in a swimming pool. My birth, my childhood, my being are meant to revive them. But I know I’m a failure at this. It’s too much to ask of a little kid—of anyone.

I hear Helen Keller whispering in my head, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” My parents tried to overcome suffering. I’m the result. Why am I thinking of my sister so often these days? Is it that I now believe that the tragedies that await us can be avoided, if fully envisioned?

Maybe the classics are chock-full of tragedy because the world is full of tragedy. Maybe they’re full of tragedy so they can also be about overcoming tragedy. But that’s not the case, really, is it? So many classics end tragically, with no overcoming at all. Why does that have to be the case, again and again? If we can pick futures with envisioning, why does literature have to remain fixed?

I know that it’s a terrible thought. You can’t change classics. One small bit of erosion could bring down the pillars of literature, which are the pillars of culture.

I push the paperback open, feel the slight give deep in the binding.

And I know what I’m going to do, and I know that it’s wrong. But just this once, just this one tiny recording . . . I’m going to change the ending of
Th
e Great Gatsby.
Myrtle Wilson will have quicker feet. It doesn’t matter who was driving the car—Myrtle will be out of the way before Gatsby’s car is even close. In fact, they’ll wave. Daisy will put down the window, and they’ll have one of those awkward hugs where the driver half leans out the window. Myrtle likes Daisy’s dress and Gatsby will agree.

It’s not easy to put away the past even when you’re making up the future—your own or Gatsby’s. But right now, I think of Adrian and his boxy nose and I miss him so much I could cry like Daisy over a bunch of shirts.

I try to remain positive about some future. It’s hard, especially at home when it’s quiet and my bed is empty. So it’s better to be here, with twelve linear feet of postcards, reading about Myrtle Wilson who is
not
doomed, reading about Gatsby who will
not
float in a swimming pool amid ribbons of his own blood.

I read some more, and as I do, I feel a quickening. I’m going back, I decide. I’m going back to all the other classics I’ve read—and I’ve read plenty—and rerecording the endings and uploading them again to the volunteer site. I feel powerful and helium light.

At just this moment, the doorknob jiggles. Binter peeks his head in and says, “Someone’s here to look for ‘Kiss Me, Honey, Do.’ ” He nods toward the African American sheet music.

“I can save Anna Karenina,” I tell Binter, and then I start counting on my fingers. “Plus Beth, Piggy, Madame Bovary, and Charlotte.”

“Um,” Binter says. “ ‘Kiss Me Honey Do’ is kind of urgent right now so . . .”

“Oh, you want me to leave?”

“Well, that or you’ll have to just sit there and not be, you know, weird.”

“Right,” I say. “I can do not-weird, short term.”

“Good.”

“Good-good.”

He frowns at me because that was slightly weird.

Binter walks into the room with a tall pale scholarly man, his bald pate shining. As he and Binter discuss sheet music, I walk to one of the boxes of postcards. I can’t be noisy—or weird—but I’m allowed to rummage.

I pick up a postcard from Wildwood, New Jersey’s boardwalk. The date is June 3, 1931. It’s written to a Helen. The sign off reads,
I’ll only miss you more tomorrow.

As soon as I read it, I know I’ve memorized it. It seems like a definition of love.

My appointment at Dr. Chin’s office is at eleven, just like Madge’s appointment at Plotnik’s. We’re hoping to have a celebratory lunch together at the Rib Shack before heading back to work.

But I’m still sitting in my cubicle. The Department of Unclaimed Goods is lodged in a grim building with an old-world heavy-on-the-asbestos vibe. Bart and I sit in adjoining cubicles and spend our days discussing our ruination while eating stiff vending-machine sandwiches. I can’t tell Bart that Madge has talked me into seeing an envisionist. I don’t want to hear all the gloating—tennis whites, boating, full hair, and so on. My ruination has gotten lonesomer. I work as a labeler at the Department of Unclaimed Goods. My fingers have grown numb from the constant rummaging through of abandoned safe deposit boxes. “One day I’ll no longer have fingerprints,” I say to Bart. “Like a mobster.”

I don’t like the job. In fact, I can feel it chewing at my soul. But if I move up and one day take over that prick Chapman’s job, the pay is actually decent. It’s a war of attrition really. Each of us in the general pool, combing safe deposit boxes, battling the sheer boredom, it’s a last man standing kind of promotional system.

Inside the current box: some faded bonds, a dowdy pear-shaped brooch, a silver dollar. This box was registered in 1927 by a man named Wickham Purdy. Sometimes the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes are so lifeless and sad that they make me feel like my heart is small and coated in enamel. I pick up the brooch. Was it Wickham Purdy’s mother’s? His wife’s? And suddenly I remember a dream from the night before. I was at work, sifting through the contents of a deposit box—it’s cruel that the brain sometimes makes you dream about what you don’t enjoy doing all day long—when I found a baby tooth. With a surge of necessity, I tried to fit the tooth into a gap in the back of my gum line because I had a feeling that I’d lost this tooth. The tooth fit perfectly, and I knew that this was my own deposit box. I found the velvet box that I’d given Madge. I opened it and it was empty. I saw a folded-up note, too. I unfolded it and, in boxy letters, read,
I love you more than you love me, Doug.
I don’t know a Doug, not really. I woke up with a jolt, feeling disoriented.

I forgot about the dream until now, this brooch.

What if the envisionist supplies a pale, grudging future that looks like the contents of this box? I see my parents in my mind so clearly; they are eating breakfast—their whole-grain porridge—as silently as two people ice fishing in separate shacks. Even if it’s bad like that, I’m going because I love Madge. She’s strong and sharp-tongued and she sees in me something I can’t even see in myself. She loves some unseen quality—a better Godfrey—and she makes me want to live up to it. When she’s disappointed in me, it’s only because she believes in me with such conviction. No one has ever believed in me the way Madge does—no Little League coach, no Boy Scout troop leader, no friend, no enemy, no teacher, not even my parents. God, it feels good to be around someone who knows you can do better, be better. With Madge, I
am
better—or at least getting there.

I look up Wickham Purdy in a nationwide database of obituaries and, sure enough, he’s dead. In fact, he died the year I was born. He was married to a woman named Netta, who’d died two years earlier. No survivors. His name will be announced on our public records website, and after a sixty-day waiting period, his belongings will be confiscated by the U.S. government.

I press my oversized
UNCLAIMED: HOLD
stamp into the red ink pad. I can hear Bart stamping away. Lately I’ve grown suspicious of Bart’s stamping speed. Does he really investigate the goods for clues, or is he a blind stamper, just assuming that no one is coming for this stuff ?

I check the time. “I have to cut out for a bit,” I tell Bart.

His face pops out from behind the partition. Bart was a great golfer at one point, but he gave it up because it made him nauseous to putt in front of people. He looks like a golfer still—athletic with a paunch, mostly ordinary. “What for?” he asks.

I pick something below the waist, figuring it’s private enough not to beg questions. “Um, I may have something wrong with my gallbladder.”

“Really? My family’s full of gallbladder issues. What’s the problem?” Bart looks at me like a concerned physician.

Perfect. “What? You’re a gallbladder expert all of a sudden?”

“Like I said, it runs in the family. That’s all.”

“Well, I’d prefer not to discuss it.” I shove my arms into my coat sleeves, hoping the gesture ends the conversation.

“I was just asking what kind. There are many different types of problems.” Bart is reaching around my cubicle, picking up my can of soda, still mostly full. He takes a sip. “I was just expressing my sincere . . .”

“Don’t do that,” I interrupt.

“What?”

“Don’t drink my soda. That’s disgusting.” I’m trying to knock Bart off topic.

“What? Since when is that a big deal?”

I glare at him before walking angrily out of the office. Now I’m the asshole who gets pissed off over soda.

I FIND DR. CHIN’S
office in the center of a strip mall, wedged between a Bagel Hut and a Nail-A-Rama. I sit in my car, the motor still running, and stare at the plate-glass storefront window. Its drawn red velvet curtains make me think of prostitution. I’ve never been with a prostitute and suddenly that seems shortsighted. I can’t now. I’m almost engaged—Madge still hasn’t put the ring on, but she is still in possession of it. I think this means we’re more engaged than not engaged, but I’m not sure.

Chin’s placard reads:

Dr. Chin, PhD, MD, ESQ, CPA

Now Offering:

The Future—For Curious People

(Also inquire about minor surgeries, overseas adoptions, mail-order bride services, pet euthanasia, notarization, and medicinal herbage.)

This is all very disconcerting, though I’m intrigued by “medicinal herbage.” Chin used to be a lawyer
and
an accountant? What’s the PhD in, anyway? Home decor or psychiatry? What kinds of minor surgeries? And is that “curious people” a play on words—curious as in full of questions or just plain weird?
Is he messing with us?
I am trying to make a mental list of things to ask him but the list is getting too big, and Madge still hasn’t put the ring on.

With the motor still running, I contemplate slamming into reverse, driving home and just standing up to Madge. I could tell her I simply refused to go. I still don’t buy that my participation is necessary. Madge explained, in great detail, how even though the future is only slightly malleable, we might have two very different perspectives about whether it’s positive or negative. In bed last night, she said, “I could see two old farts on a beach with metal detectors, and think, ‘How dismal.’ And you could see two old farts on a beach with metal detectors and think, ‘Wow, we finally made it!’ ” I didn’t like my portrayal in her example, but we’d just had sex and I wasn’t thinking straight enough to get into a fight. Fighting with Madge requires top form, and even at that, I’m used to losing or, at the very least, coming out humbled. Sometimes I think people date too long before they get married. We end up being old married couples before we ever say “I do.” It’s not our fault. It’s generational. Sometimes I wish Madge and I had gotten married two weeks after the whole vaginalia conversation, on a tide of optimism that might have really buoyed us for a long time. Why can’t I just say what I already feel sure of: my future without Madge is messy and depressed, like a dinghy boat at sea.

I lean forward, flip up the sun visor, and squint at the plate glass more intently. I see a glint of something there—red paint melting into the backdrop of red curtains. Is it a dragon? Is there faded lettering overhead?

In what seems like slow motion, I cut the engine, climb out of the car, and walk up to the window. I can now make out the chipped lettering over the dragon:
CHIN’S CHINESE TAKEOUT
. “Shit,” I am saying to no one, but I still say it. “Shit on this.”

If envisionists had existed when I was a kid, like four or five or whatever, I could have seen this exact moment—me, standing in the cold, in front of Dr. Chin’s ex-take-out restaurant, bullied by my fiancée-to-be, and wouldn’t I have been disappointed in myself ? I would’ve punched myself in the fucking face. “Where’s the highest ledge?” I would’ve asked anyone who would talk to me. The envisionist could have shown my parents their awful future of detachment interrupted by bickering. If envisionists existed before my parents got married, they may have decided against it. And if my mother had been warned by an envisioning session that Mart Thigpen would knock her up and leave her “high and dry,” I wouldn’t exist at all. Maybe that’s a big part of why this whole thing doesn’t make any sense. It’s tampering with the notions of my own existence, and the flimsy, dubious imaginary existence of my own offspring.

But, really, it’s bullshit. Why didn’t Madge just put on the ring? “Madge,” I say to no one. “Shit on Madge.” Will we one day be two old farts on a beach with metal detectors? The possibility of lost buffalo nickels, wrinkles under more wrinkles? Fuck that. Chin is a failed Chinese take-out guy and a failed lawyer and a failed accountant and a failed PhD in who the fuck knows. Why couldn’t I do what Chin does? Hell, I haven’t failed at anything, really. I know this is directly related to the fact that I’ve never really tried to succeed at much of anything, but it’s easy not to think about that. I want to give Madge a big speech about love, true love, and the way you have to have enough faith in it to say yes to the unknown future of your life with someone. Or maybe Chin will fail so obviously that I will return to Madge with proof of just how stupid all of this is. That’s why I’m out of the car and walking into Chin’s office, opening the door, jangling some bells strung to the interior handle. But the bells are the same type of bells as the ones on the front door of Fontana’s Super Mart and all I can think of is the faded lettering on the bottom of my receipt:
You are a loser
.

DR. CHIN’S WAITING ROOM
is small and packed, much like the greening, overstocked fish tank in the corner where slow fish do laps. I hang my coat on one of the last available hooks.

The good news is that there’s nothing very weird (or curious) about the people waiting. They look a little curdled, maybe, definitely bored, a little downtrodden, bruised, slightly repulsive. But aside from one woman singing, a little teary-eyed, to an aged, wheezing schnauzer in her lap, they’re unremarkable. The other patients wear poly blends, flip through magazines. An elderly man dozes. I wonder what each of them is here for. Notary seals on mortgages? Root canals or to see if their moles are cancerous? A mail-order bride or child from a third-world country? A bag of pot? Or, plain and simple, a glimpse into the future? In any case, their ordinariness is comforting.

The office smells like Chinese takeout and incense—a combination that reminds me that I probably got stoned too much when I was younger. The incense is so sweet, though, I can’t find any heartfelt regret. Those were fine days. I find the sudden onslaught of nostalgia frustrating. I don’t want to lose my edge. I don’t trust Dr. Chin or the incense or the overpopulated fish tank or even the ordinariness of everything around me.

At the frosted receptionist window where you check in, I get in line behind a woman about my age. She’s frantically rummaging through her pocketbook, which looks cavernous. She’s saying, “Hold on just a sec. It’s in here.” She turns to me without looking at me. “Hold this, will you?”

“Um, okay,” I say.

She hands me her wallet and a tube of lipstick and a pocket-sized Chinese-English dictionary, which I can only take as a bad sign—does Dr. Chin even speak English?—and some crumpled bills. Noticing, with a quick glance, that she’s completely filled my hands, she puts a small stack of things—a train ticket, some business cards and receipts—between her lips.

The receptionist is highly annoyed. She’s Asian. Her name tag says Lisa. Her eyebrows are pierced with dainty hoops. I’m expecting a foreign accent, but hers is more Paramus, New Jersey. “Could you sit down? There are other people to check in.”

The woman stops and looks at the receptionist and then at me.

The phone rings. The receptionist picks up. “Dr. Chin’s now offering the future for curious people,” she says, and then firmly states policy. “Chin only does notaries before nine a.m.”

The woman tries to say something, but it comes out all
m
’s and tiny
b
’s, what with the things she’s holding in her mouth. It’s only now I notice that she’s completely beautiful—unruly hair, deep brown eyes, skin the color of sun, and those pretty lips clamped around a few flimsy scraps of her identity.

“What are you looking for?” I ask her.

“Her license,” the receptionist says. “You’ll need yours, too, sir. What’s your name?” Clearly she wants to move the line along.

“Godfrey Burkes,” I say, eyeing the small stack of paperwork in the woman’s mouth. I dip down and look underneath. I think I see the license—a bit of laminated stuff sticking out from behind a receipt. “Here,” I say, pouring her stuff back into her pocketbook. I point to the stack. “May I?”

She nods her head, her eyes roving around the room as if she’s suddenly realized that she’s in public. I pinch the stack, and she opens her mouth a little. “Right here,” I say, showing her the license.

She smiles. There’s a fine gap between her two front teeth. I am immediately enamored by the gap and everything below and above it. “That’s such a bad photo,” she says, her eyes pointing to the license. It’s surprising how clearly she speaks when she has full use of her mouth.

I hand it to the receptionist, who’s finishing up a call. “Try the balm,” the receptionist is saying into the phone. “If it doesn’t clear up in two weeks, he’ll lance it.”

“See,” the woman says to the receptionist, “I told you it was right here.”

The receptionist rolls her eyes and hangs up the phone. She looks at the ID. “Thank you, Evelyn,” she says sarcastically.