The Here and Now (20 page)

“How many times was the path used?”

“Until a couple of days ago, I would have said once. But it had to have been used again for my father to have gotten here.”

“To 2010.”

“Yes. I can’t even imagine what the world was like by the time he left.”

“Maybe there were other times too.”

I shiver. “There’s the legend of Traveler One. Not that anybody believes it.”

“Who’s Traveler One?”

“Every one of us has a number, from our chief counselor, Traveler Two, to my mother to me—Traveler 971, by the way—to Ashley Myers, the youngest, Traveler 996. Traveler One supposedly used the path first and learned the ways of time. He was like our Moses. He handed down the twelve rules.”

“And then they retired his number.”

“Right.”

“So that means he’s around here somewhere.”

“If he exists and everybody comes out in 2010, then he must be.”

“I could have seen him in the woods too.”

“I doubt it, though. I suspect he’s what you politely call a ‘metaphor.’ They invented him to give legitimacy to the rules. So it wouldn’t seem like they were just making shit up.”

We walk around to the back of the school to the little playground. I played there only a few times before it was dismantled. They didn’t want to be tempting kids outside.

“You know what surprises me most?” I say as we each sit down on a swing.

“What?”

“That everybody knows.”

Ethan kicks at the dirt under his swing. “What do you mean?”

“Everybody here knows what’s going to happen. Before we came here, I imagined that people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries must have been ignorant of what they were doing to the world, because how else could they have kept on doing it? But they do know. They don’t know exactly how it will unfold, but they know a lot.”

“We do know, don’t we?”

“People from the twenty eighties look back on this period now and the one just ahead as the golden age of science. As the golden age of a lot of things, actually. You can’t imagine the nostalgia for this exact time. The science was good enough to predict a century ahead what was going to happen. And it’s not just a handful of scientists who know, it’s everybody. I
read about it, hear about it, see it on the news practically every day. There couldn’t be any more warning.”

“Not everybody ignores it.”

“No, that’s true. But people here have strange ideas about what to do to help. There is Earth Day and all kinds of green products that make people feel good—as though organic cotton sheets and hemp socks are going to do the trick. But nobody does the hard things. Not if it costs them anything. Nobody calls for any real sacrifices. Politicians aren’t very brave. I mean, eventually they will demand sacrifices—they’ll have to, there will be no choice—but by then it will be too late.”

He looks distraught. “So that’s what happens.”

“That’s what happens.”

He is quiet for a long time. “And your leaders know all this and aren’t doing anything about it?”

“The opposite. They’re making sure nobody does. You read my father’s letter. When we got here, they acted like they were the Founding Fathers of the USA or something, bold and innovative. I believed it at first, but it wasn’t true. Everything they did was for secrecy and manipulation—they created birth certificates, passports, credit reports, family histories. Even old family photos. They tried to block out memories of our old life, but it didn’t really work. Except for the trip itself and a day or two afterward, I remember almost everything. And then they tried to retrain us for our lives here, packing a whole childhood’s worth of adaptation into a couple of years. They were thorough, but they still missed a few things.” I chew on my bottom lip. “Like teaching us card games, for instance.”

Ethan smiles at me and I smile back. He pumps his legs
to get his swing going, and I pump mine. I think I would like to stay here on these swings together until midnight, possibly until the end of my life.

“And they missed a very big thing, which was freedom. We had secrets to keep and scripts to follow, but no freedom at all. I don’t think Benjamin Franklin would have approved of that.”

“No. Not much.”

“It’s possible there might have been a little more idealism at first, but when they found how comfortable and safe and nice it is here, I think whatever they had of it was lost. They turned us into parasites. They rely on the future too much to want to change it.”

“Even though …”

“Even though.” I shrug. “For a long time I wanted to trust them. The community was my whole world—many of them I like and some I love. They all go along with what the leaders say, or at least they try. But I can’t anymore. They are as complacent, shortsighted and selfish as everybody else. And a lot more corrupt.”

“God, that’s depressing.”

“But the thing is, no one really believes in the future, do they? It’s like believing in your own death. You can’t do it. Nobody can. Not even us, who have seen it with our eyes.”

Of course my mind pulls up the tiny, hateful line of print in tomorrow’s paper. Another death I don’t, can’t, won’t believe.

He is quiet for a moment. “Does your mother still trust them?”

“She doesn’t go against them, I can say that much. I don’t know if that’s out of consent or fear.”

“Do you think she knew about your father?”

“I don’t think so.” I close my eyes. “I’d really rather tell myself she didn’t.” I run my finger along the rusted chain. “My mother went through a lot, you know. They say suffering makes you stronger and wiser, but I’m worried that more often it makes you weaker and more scared. She wants us to be safe for another hour, another day. That’s what she cares about.”

“That’s a sad thought. That’s probably what most people care about,” Ethan says.

I stare at him and I want to cry. I realize how true it is. I’m weak and scared too. Because of that line of print in the newspaper, that’s what I care about too.

“But you are different, because you know how much that hour costs,” he says solemnly. “And now I am different too. We know what happens if we do nothing.”

I wipe my nose on my sleeve. I want to be different. But now I am afraid.

He times our swings to catch my hand and holds it until we are swinging in unison. You get the feeling nobody ever denied him a playground.

He expertly stops the swinging and pulls me up before I can get my balance. He is dragging me purposefully back in the direction of the car. “Until today,” he says. “That is what today is all about.”

And I know he’s right. We have to keep going.

“Wasn’t there anything cool? Wasn’t there anything great?” Ethan asks me somewhere between Asbury Park and Freehold.

I want to give him everything he wants, tell him everything
he ever wanted to know. He’s stifled his curiosity for a long time. I just wish the news were better.

He casts a look at me. “You don’t have to tell me now. No hurry. I plan to be asking you questions for the next seventy to eighty years.”

What an ache that gives me. I can barely swallow down the feeling. “I heard about some cool things,” I say, trying to loosen up my throat for the words to come through. “I saw a few of them, but mostly they weren’t working so well by the time I was born. Computing technology by the late teens and early twenties was totally released from boxes and screens, keyboards and mice. Images could be almost anywhere, on screens thin as paper or soft as a curtain or just projected into the air in front of you. You manipulated information and images directly with your hands, your eyes, even your mind in some cases.”

Ethan nods keenly, happily. “You can see all that coming,” he says.

“One cool thing was this app that makes you disappear. I never really saw one work, but I read about them in stories written in the twenties and thirties. I think they are perfecting the technology now—where sensors read the contours of your body as you move and project the background onto you so you blend in seamlessly with your surroundings.”

“I’ve read about that,” Ethan says. He glances at me again. “It’s funny to hear you talk about the future as the past. Or strange, anyway.”

“I know it is. I always have a hard time with tense.”

“So what else?”

“Well, there was a lot of R and D money and scientific genius spent on pills and simple surgeries to let people eat as
much as they wanted without getting fat. And there were big advances in plastic surgery technology, so people could shape their bodies exactly how they wanted and look super young, even when they were, like, seventy. I think it got to be pretty creepy, to tell you the truth.”

Ethan’s face is sober. “What a waste. And meanwhile the world is falling apart.”

“Almost all of that craziness petered out by the end of the forties. And it’s really ironic, because the serious food shortages started in the fifties, and for the majority of people even in this country, being fat was no longer an option.”

Ethan shakes his head. “That’s just sad.”

I can hear Poppy’s voice describing these things, impassioned at the kitchen table. I think of the old man in the dark under the table in the community center, telling me about the fork. I still can’t hear my Poppy in that voice.

“So what if today, tonight, really is the fork?” Ethan says. “How is it going to change the story? Is Mona Ghali’s research that important, do you think? I doubt it will fix the fat pills.”

I’ve been thinking about that too. “Her research is energy.”

“Yeah. She’s working on capturing the energy of ocean surface waves.”

“And if it works?”

Ethan considers. “Why don’t you tell me how the story goes. Starting around now.”

I should know all this by heart. These were the cautionary tales Poppy loved to teach. “Okay, so as of now the weather patterns for growing food are still pretty stable, as they have been for a long time, and people take it for granted. You have the Gulf Stream warming up Europe, and there are rainy places and dry places. Right?”

“Right.”

“But then everything starts to change, more or less as they predict. The ice caps melting, the ice sheets collapsing, the water levels rising. It’s slow enough at first that people think they can adapt. I remember seeing the ruins of some pretty crazy sea walls people tried to build in the forties. But then it just accelerates. The whole thing changes over about fifteen years. There are droughts and floods and storms that rip the topsoil right off the earth. Once people recover from one thing, there is another. The price of basic stuff like wheat and rice skyrockets, and governments come down because they can’t feed people.” I look up. I realize I’m talking in a rush. “So there you have it: your quickie history. The decline of humankind in under one minute.”

“And then the mosquito.”

“Skipping ahead about twenty, thirty years, but yes.”

“That’s at least partly a climate issue too.”

“Definitely it is.”

“So if Mona’s figuring out a clean, cheap energy source that doesn’t release any carbon, that’s a huge deal.”

“Yes.”

“And if Mona’s the one who’s going to patent this at a US lab, then maybe it helps fix the finances of this country, not having to buy all that oil, but instead having some technology to export.”

“Would be nice if we had some other, better future to compare it to, but it does sound plausible.”

“Doesn’t help with the fat pills, though.”

“Well, we can’t ask Mona to fix everything.”

Ethan is thoughtful for a moment. “What if the future doesn’t want to be changed? What if it wants what it wants?
What if it makes no difference what any of us do, whether we are heroes or cowards?”

I hate this thought. On this day of days, I am so scared of it I won’t even think it. “The future doesn’t
want
anything,” I say, a little too forcefully. “We’re the ones who make the future.” That’s what I want to believe, anyway.

I think of Ethan and our eighty years of questions. I think of Poppy and how much he sacrificed for this.

EIGHTEEN

Ethan insists on teaching me to play Hearts over floppy French fries and terrible hamburgers at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway. Ethan eats his heartily. He puts down the wrapper with a sigh. I can hardly choke down a bite of mine.