* * *
…
Another conference, this one in the heartland. Sylvia gives a lecture while I sit in the front row, holding her purse like a proper assistant. She talks about a book called Nature and Silence. There is no higher or lower, it says. Everything is equally evolved.
Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved. After all, they have about three hundred million olfactory receptors in their noses compared with our six million. If we privileged longevity, it would be bristlecone pines, which can live for several thousand years. And you could make a case that banana slugs are sexually superior to us. They are hermaphrodites who mate up to three times a day.
There are a lot of questions afterward. Some of them are friendly; some are not. But Sylvia stands firm on her idea that humans are nothing particularly special. “The only thing we are demonstrably better at than other animals is sweating and throwing,” she says.
Now I’m on a park bench, noting the scattered lettuce of someone else’s sandwich. I clean it up, then resent doing it. On the way back, I don’t notice anything underfoot, anything overhead. Possibly there was a light coming greenly through the leaves. Impossible to be sure.
What is the Nano Hummingbird? What is the Robofish?
* * *
…
When I get home, the dog is in the kitchen, tearing a rawhide bone into slobbery bits. My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden. Later, I spend some time trying to find out the dog’s secret name, but she’s not having it.
* * *
…
The first reading of the year is the newly sober English professor. He has been writing poetry at rehab. One of them is from the point of view of a hat being worn by a beautiful woman. After he reads it, he directs some remarks to his students in attendance. “I have written about a hat though I have never been a hat,” he says. Later, as we are boxing up the unsold books, I find a card someone has left for him.
You’ve received this card because your privilege is showing.
Your words/actions are making others feel uncomfortable.
Check your privilege.
[ √ ] White
[ √ ] Heterosexual
[ √ ] Male
[ √ ] Neuro-typical
[ √ ] Socioeconomic
[ √ ] Citizen
“What do you think this is?” he asks me.
The future?
* * *
…
And the lonely heart engineer wants to downsize the government. A desire for a small government is nothing new, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a U.S. government official proposed closing the office of patents. Everything of importance had already been invented, he said.
Ben is reading a book about pre-Socratic philosophy. I’ve always had an obsession with lost books, all the ones half written or recovered in pieces. So today in my lunch, I find a sandwich, a cookie, and a note from him.
Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.
(Democritus wrote seventy books. Only fragments survive.)
* * *
…
I really need to unpack this suitcase. Are you trying to tell me something? Ben asked last night as he stepped over it again. We have these little Are you leaving me? jokes. The oldest one goes like this:
Be right back, I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes, the man tells his wife.
(Years pass.)
* * *
…
I swear the hippie letters are a hundred times more boring than the end-timer ones. They are all about composting toilets and water conservation and electric cars and how to live lightly on the earth while thinking ahead for seven generations. “Environmentalists are so dreary,” I tell Sylvia. “I know, I know,” she says.
* * *
…
Outside the library, the woman who is always on the bench is talking about Thanksgiving. She’s had enough, she doesn’t want to go anymore, she tells someone. It’s May, but I think she’s smart to plan ahead. She has long gray hair, a briefcase filled with papers. There are various stories about who she used to be. Grad student still working on her dissertation is a popular one. But my boss says she once worked in the cafeteria. I try to slip by her bench unnoticed, but she stops her conversation to ask me for money. I don’t have the usual dollar, just some coins and a twenty. Once in a fluster I gave her a ten, and ever since I’ve been a disappointment to her. I dig out some change from my pocket. She takes a careful look at the nickels and dimes. God blesses me anyway.
* * *
…
One night, Ben’s mother calls from Florida, a.k.a. paradise. She wants to be buried there, she says. And she’s talked his father into it too. But there’s a problem. They already bought grave plots by their old synagogue. Could we maybe sell them to someone else for her? “I don’t know how we’d do that, Mom,” he says. She offers that we could take them ourselves, but Ben doesn’t want to be buried in Hackensack, New Jersey.
I think of the time Sylvia interviewed that famous futurist. She asked him what was coming next, and he repeated his best-known prediction: Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.
* * *
…
Some of the people at this private dinner have begun to invest in floating cities, the kind that can be anchored in international waters and run by unmeddlesome governments, but our hosts are gentler sorts, longtime listeners, they say. They take notes during Sylvia’s talk, but in the end they still have one nagging question: What will be the safest place? No one they’d consulted with would give them a straight answer.
“But you’ve interviewed everyone. Is there any consensus? Any clustering patterns of these scientists and journalists? We’re not asking for ourselves, but we have children, you understand.”