Want Not (57 page)

Byron Torrance’s side was lobbying for a strong language component, language being in their estimation the most unambiguous form of communication. You could blame Elwin’s thirty-plus years of studying language death for his resistance (as the Torrancians did), but Elwin found this position almost criminally naive. Of the seven languages they proposed for engraving the warning message, one (Navajo) was already endangered, and the others—Arabic, English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French, the six primary languages of the United Nations—were, by his projections, unlikely to survive another five hundred years in anything close to their current states. His counter-proposal: a warning message based upon pictograms, which he’d sketched out for the panel (cartoon figures fleeing the site in horror, corpses, mayhem, a version of Munch’s
The Scream
that Sharon unhelpfully noted had a closer resemblance to the kid from the “Home Alone” movies). He’d gone so far as to fish out from the surviving boxes in his basement his childhood cache of “Henry” comic books, and passing them out to the panelists he stressed how comprehensible and entertaining they were, despite their absence of words, or language of any kind. Einstein, Elwin reminded them, didn’t think in words or numerals—rather in images, which he then translated into words. And the oldest enduring communications, he noted, were Paleolithic-era cave paintings, which when you got down to it weren’t so very different from “Henry.”

“But knowing what a cave painting depicts isn’t the same as understanding the message it’s conveying,” Torrance shot back. “That’s the real trick. Infinite clarity. Take a stick figure holding a spear, painted beside a bear. What’s the message? Lots of bears here, good eating? Or instead: Watch out, hungry bears here, make sure you’re armed? Or maybe no message.” He nodded toward Sharon, as if to joggle her well-known alliance with Elwin. “Art for art’s sake. The painter working out a dream he’d had about killing a bear. Understanding what it is doesn’t mean we understand what it says. Especially when you factor in all the elements we can’t decipher—the handprints at the Chauvet caves, good example.”

“Interpretation of imagery can be ambiguous,” Elwin granted. “But if conveyed in a dead script, there
isn’t
any interpretation.”

Torrance wagged his head, sliding away the issue of “Henry” unopened before him. “We can’t base deep-time communication on a comic book.”

“And we also can’t send the equivalent of the Voynich Manuscript into deep time,” Elwin blurted back. A low mumble circled the table, and Sharon leaned in with an inquisitively raised finger. “A fifteenth-century codex,” Elwin explained. “Written in an unknown language that no one has ever been able to decipher. Not even World War II codebreakers. Definitely not linguists.” Shooting a dark glance toward Torrance, he added, “A lot of scholars suspect it’s a hoax. Which I’d call our worst-worst-case scenario.”

Torrance twirled a pencil through his fingers, impatiently flexing his jaw. “So it comes down to your sense of futility versus ours,” he said, but before Elwin could respond the panel’s legal expert (surely a middle child) chimed, “I’d call that a good argument for redundancy.” Torrance disagreed, however, and so did the others. There would be minimal images: primarily the trefoil radiation symbol, which struck Elwin as as useless an image as the biohazard symbol in his father’s bathroom at the nursing home. It was like attempting to communicate with a newly discovered Amazonian tribe via naval signal flags. The panel also voted to add translations of the warning in several more Native American languages as a compensatory gesture for secreting a quarter-million barrels of toxic waste beneath sacred tribal grounds. Elwin might have just as well stayed home.

“You’re really wadded up about all this, aren’t you?” Sharon said later, at the bar of their Mason Street hotel.

“Am I?” Elwin said. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. It’s just the
arrogance
of it. This idea that there will always be more. That civilization won’t ever stop growing, won’t ever emerge from puberty. That the arc of human history has to swing upward—”

“It’s a
preliminary
report on a
proposal,
” Sharon cut in, flexing her jaw with impatience the same way Torrance had. “For a project that won’t be implemented until 2030 at the earliest, and probably won’t be implemented at all if the Republicans have their say in it.”

“But—”

“For a waste dump, El. For a garbage dump.”

Absorbing this like a slow poison, he said weakly, “For the only epitaph we’re likely to leave on this goddamn planet.”

She stared at him in a peculiar, head-tilted way, as if noting something new about him, an unplayed B-side. “This isn’t
your
epitaph, El,” she said, and that’s when her hand came down onto his, with the weight of not merely affection but some heavier, warmer element, too. Fate, love, mercy: one of the dense nouns, the ones into which we stuff all the mysteries of existence. With a strange palpable swiftness Elwin felt the future narrowing, the deep-time horizon shrinking back so that all he could spy of the future was its foreground: the next hour, or maybe the next week or month or year, or perhaps, if he squinted out toward the furthest point, the one, two, three decades remaining in the life of Elwin Cross Jr. But nothing more. “Let’s just let what happens happen, right?” he heard Sharon saying, and he latched onto a liberating tone in that otherwise empty-sounding notion, the dissonant bliss of surrender:
let it be,
like the song said. Because what was going to happen,
would
happen. Languages would die, despite Elwin’s efforts at triage. His father would die. He himself would die. Civilization as we understood it would die. And had he gotten his way, in five or ten thousand years someone—human, cyborg, extraterrestrial—might have come upon his granite comic book of horror and wondered, perhaps, why anyone would’ve thought it mattered, why anyone might’ve cared. We came, we saw, we trashed. One futility versus another.

And now, Monday evening, the on-ramp to I-78 looming just past the next red light: Now it
was
happening. His father had died. The expectedness of this event—moving a parent into a nursing home is nothing if not an act of anticipation—somehow didn’t blunt the sorrow of it. Loose tears didn’t flow, as they had for Jane, but instead there came to him a tightening sense of gloom, of a finality that can’t be felt in advance, no matter the forecast, no matter the certitude. Out of bridge-and-tunnel instinct he dialed in the traffic report on the radio in his new car—he’d bought a brand-new Ford hybrid, despite Christopher’s bilingual objection that it lacked
“cojones”
—but flicked it off just as fast, realizing that the traffic didn’t really matter. His route was his route. Plus, as the director said, there wasn’t any rush. Slowness, in fact, felt like a virtue. This would be his last drive down to Henry Street, and he almost wanted to savor it—not because it was enjoyable but because the drive had become a component of his relationship with his father, an act of devotion that doubled as a means of assuaging his guilt for having interred his father in that human junkyard, in that scrap heap of obsolete ancestors. He watched the familiar sights sliding by—the merkin of suburban leafiness giving way to the obscure and dilapidated factories on the outskirts of Newark, the salt domes, the billboards he’d read a thousand times, the heat-wobbled air above the smokestacks, Manhattan appearing as a serrated grayness on the horizon—as his car was funneled into all that teeming metal hurtling eastward on I-78 and then the Pulaski Skyway, the toxic green swirls of the Meadowlands roiling far below him. When Sharon called him back he told her about his father, and she told him to be strong. “I’m there with you, El,” she said, and he drew solace from the idea: that amidst all these thousands of people gliding beside him, someone was with him, even invisibly, even merely as a sympathetic cliché.

At the Roth Residence, Boolah led Elwin into his father’s room. “I’m real sorry,” Boolah said, with a genuineness that had eluded his boss. “I’m gonna miss your dad. He was a real pain in the ass. You just holler if you need anything.”

Elwin sat down on the edge of the bed, inhaling the same scents his father had awakened to every day: the wafting antiseptic sourness, the fake-floral reek of prescription moisturizing creams, soiled undergarments fermenting in big blue plastic bins. He wanted to think of his father as he had been before all this, out of filial loyalty, but it was impossible. Broken by the Alzheimer’s disease into the
before
and the
after,
they were like two different people, related but separate. The before-father he’d already lost, at least partly; this loss, of the after-father, felt like a physical disappearance trailing years behind the dwindling of his essence, as though the mind had finally claimed the body too. Yearning for a moment of what Jane would call closure, even forced closure, Elwin recalled his father’s oft-stated ambition, cribbed from Jonas Salk: to be a good ancestor. “You were,” he said aloud to the room. The room said nothing in return, certainly no indication that Elwin was a good descendant. The man who’d consecrated his life to the study of the past, Elwin thought, had bequeathed just one thing to the future: his children. Jane, Elwin, and David: These were his sole attempts at deep-time communication.

Elwin didn’t know where to start. He’d brought bags with him, and there were cardboard boxes in the trunk if he needed them. He picked his father’s eyeglasses off the nightstand and mindlessly wiped the oily smears from their lenses with his shirttail. The eyeglasses had been resting atop one of the leather-bound notebooks his father’d always favored—demanded, really—for his writing. One of his many stubborn quirks. He refused to write in anything else, and a year ago, when Elwin discovered the company that made them was fading into bankruptcy, Elwin had bought an entire case of them. The unopened case was still in his basement, and though he’d briefly considered posting it for sale on Craigslist, too, he’d held off. He’d never shaken the dumb hope, he supposed, that his father would find some secret back exit out of the diagnosis, would refute all the clinical forecasts, and fill every one of those notebooks with his hyperactive pen-scrawl—the hope Jane was always upbraiding him for. He brought the notebook to his lap, and opening it to the first page he began to read.

Hopes aside, on some pragmatic level he knew that Jane had always been right: that writing and dementia could not coexist. He girded himself for the comeuppance of gibberish. Yet he frowned, seeing something else. His father’s penmanship, true, evinced terrible effort—Elwin could see the hesitations riddling the script, the spaces between the letters suggesting that words had been started but forgotten midway through, then pieced back together again—but the thoughts expressed were lucid, if sometimes repetitive.
Often
repetitive, he admitted to himself, flipping forward and then back, trying to make sense of what he was reading. Not that it was nonsensical; it wasn’t. He skimmed a long and fluid analysis of the Peloponnesian War that any historian would claim with pride. What didn’t make sense, to Elwin, was that his father had written it.

With the notebook in hand he moved to the chair, where he’d spent so many hours sitting by his father while the old man kvetched and bewailed. He knew the book was intended to be a treatise on genocide—they’d talked about the book, he and his father, and the subject after all was his father’s historiographic specialty—but Elwin wasn’t prepared for his father’s radically grim thesis, for his intimate tone, for the almost biblical pronouncements it contained.
Genocide, defined as the systematic and deliberate annihilation of specific groups or classes of people, is not incidental to the history of civilization,
he read.
It is in fact a
function
of civilization, in that civilization developed as a means of resource control, and the most effective control of resources lies in broadening resource availability while limiting resource consumption and therefore depletion.
Elwin reread those sentences, to ensure he was understanding them correctly.
Genocide was less an anomalous tool than a necessary component, sewn into the fabric of the earliest proto-agrarian societies. Its history demonstrates that it cannot be viewed as a reaction, aberrant or otherwise, to external factors, nor can it be seen as a unique and uniquely contemporaneous perversion of civilization. If we unlock genocide from its semantic restraints, as I will do in the pages that follow, we can clearly see that it has occurred, in one part of the globe or another, and in varying scope and intensity, on nearly every day of recorded history. It
is
civilization. If you are reading these words it is part of you, as it is, painfully, part of me.

Elwin looked up in confusion. He’d never heard his father express or even allude to thoughts like these, nor had his father ever injected the personal into his writings. Even the acknowledgments in his previous books were written in the third person (“the author wishes to thank . . .”). Even the
birthday cards
he wrote were like that: “Your father wishes you a happy 12th birthday.” As for his father’s thesis, it seemed slightly deranged—demented, even—and for a moment Elwin wondered if his father hadn’t struck back at his Alzheimer’s-destroyed neurons by slapping civilization with a fatal diagnosis of its own. Except that, reading farther, Elwin found himself nodding at the arguments, his nodding bolstered by his thirty-plus years of watching the world’s languages and thus its human heterogeneity vanish word by word, sometimes through systematic linguicide and other times through the gradual consumption of larger dominant cultures, or just lost in the flood. He flipped to the end of the notebook, hoping for a resolution, for a cogent and synthesized closing defense of his father’s premise, but the writing—worse and worse as he followed it deeper into the notebook, compound sentences giving way to bare and repetitious declarations, declarations giving way to false starts and to thoughts that went dribbling down the page—stopped at page 248, with his father still mired in the massacres of antiquity, in the early building blocks of his case. Elwin closed the notebook, feeling his loss sharpened now, because after all these months of making small talk, he now had questions, questions for which there would never be answers: how and why his father had drawn these dour conclusions, what they meant to him, what . . . but Elwin had only this single half-filled notebook, this physical question mark, preserved in the amber. This inscrutable map of what the son had missed or ignored.