The Future for Curious People: A Novel (6 page)

I DOWN THE PILL
and, in a few minutes the screen goes blue and the words
Madge Hedgeworth and Godfrey Burkes / A Chin Production
pop up like the low-budget video production of a shitty wedding—the union of two people with criminally awful taste. A rose lying on its side underlines the title and then a dubious copyright symbol, the year, and
A Chin Production
appear in cursive letters.

My thumb is poised on the joystick. This has been a waste of my copay money, my insurance company’s money, and my time off from Unclaimed Goods. But I can imagine how I’ll tell it, that I was in it for laughs all along, the blond Dr. Chin, the signing in triplicate, the idiotic leather straps on the metal helmet. My parents will say,
Oh, Godfrey, you’re such a wonderful storyteller!
And Bart and Amy will have to concede that their envisionist was pretty hokey, too, worthless in fact. Bart might say,
I’ll probably be completely bald in five years!
And
We don’t even like tennis and boating!
Maybe even Madge would laugh along and then cup my face in her hands and say,
Poor Godfrey, I can’t believe I put you through all of that.

I start to feel a little loose and dreamy just as the first image appears on the screen—a small green car pulls into a driveway. A teenage girl gets out and starts across a front yard to a house. She’s pretty with pale eyes and dark hair. She looks barely sixteen. She’s wearing a skirt and a jean jacket—it surprises me how jean jackets refuse to become obsolete.

And that’s when a man appears. He’s holding a watering can. It’s me, of course. I recognize myself. I’m forty, wearing what my father would call
trousers—
those almost high-waisted pants with pleats down the front. I wonder if I have a better job now; the pants seem to indicate a higher function in life. At forty I appear relatively fit, but the problem is that I have gelled hair, which is obviously lame. The first thing I realize is that in this alternate future I have very little, if any, personal dignity. My future self says to the girl, “Hey there.”

“My mom wanted me to tell you that she dropped off some seed packets. They’re in the backyard, under a pot.”

“Great!” future-me says.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” the girl says.

I look down at the watering can. “Thanks, but it’s okay. I don’t like to talk about it.” I shake my head and stare at the ground. I recognize this as my sympathy pose; it’s the one I strike when I’d really like someone to feel sorry for me. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I have such a pose, but I can tell that this is a fake little moment.

The two undeniable facts of the situation are these: One. Something awful has happened to my mother. Two. In this alternate future, I’ve taken to hitting on teenage girls.

“Where’s Madge?” the girl asks.

Future-me raises my eyebrows. “Just calling her Madge now?”

The girl nods.

“She’s taken her latest dog to a restaurant. She’s, you know,
socializing.
” What in the hell does this mean? Is Madge openly cheating on me? Do people in the future openly cheat and call each other’s latest lovers
dogs
? The girl doesn’t seem surprised by anything future-me is saying.

“Well,” the girl says. “See you later!” She walks to her tiny car, hops in the driver’s seat, and waves through the open window.

“See you later, Lib!”
Lib?
This name means nothing to me. Future-me watches the girl, this Lib, ride off, and then I plod on. Future-me walks like now-me walks, with a small bounce forward with each step. I can’t deny that this is, in fact, me. A forty-year-old man about to water his wife’s flowers while she’s out possibly cheating on him in broad daylight with his full knowledge. And is my mother really dead? What’s happened to my mother?

Future-me stops suddenly. He looks down the street, watching the car drive out of sight. But then something else catches his eye. Someone’s legs are pumping a bike. A woman’s legs. Her skirt is flipping up on her thigh, six houses away or so but heading toward future-me—it’s a close-up on the legs and the skirt and a big blue bike—its brand blurred out. The legs are beautiful but not really young. They strike me as the legs of a woman my age now. Where did the bike come from? The legs? I want to will myself to look at this woman’s face, but I don’t. She glides on by. Future-me turns around and walks back to the front of the house. He plops the watering can, a prop after all, down on the stoop. Evidently I had no intentions of watering Madge’s flowers or finding some seed pack.

Do Madge and I get married and stay in the Baltimore area? Could be. The houses are boxy, older. A few are strung with Christmas lights, although by the looks of the small green yards and the sunlight, it’s late spring. I watch myself walk into the house. It’s design is all Madge, retro and antiqued.

As future-me walks through the kitchen, which is unremarkable, the screen fades and then there’s a picture of a tall blonde woman standing at the foot of a hotel staircase. I don’t recognize her. She’s gorgeous though, looking busty in an angora sweater. She introduces herself as Svetlana and explains that she’s a “vivacious Russian woman, looking for a strong American partner.” I feel immediately deflated. Svetlana isn’t part of my future. This is a fucking commercial. Dr. Chin’s voice pipes up in the background while the screen cuts to footage of Svetlana walking through a meadow. Chin says, “The future can take many forms. Please talk to Dr. Chin, offering the future for curious people, to see your future with Svetlana or one of her many friends.” Svetlana is now sitting alone at a lovely picnic, beckoning to the camera. I am disgusted; this whole interruption seems intentionally cruel.

The screen fades and my own future starts again. Future-me opens a door that leads to basement stairs. He claps and the lights flip on. He claps twice and then there’s music—it’s the first few chords from the Cure’s “Love Song,” one of my favorite songs from high school. The basement is awful. Lined with boxes and paint cans and an extra roll of brown shag, there sits my old furniture—an old sofa, coffee table, lamp, and surfboard—in the same pitiful configuration that I had as a bachelor, the same configuration that is now likewise arranged in our cramped spare bedroom. Has Madge forced me to re-create my old life in the basement of this new life because she just won’t give me one square inch? All this while she’s out with some
dog,
socializing
in restaurant bars? I watch myself sit down heavily on the sofa, open the drawer in the coffee table, and pull out a pump bottle of lotion.

“No,” I say aloud in the small waiting room. “Don’t. Jesus. C’mon.” There’s no way I’m not pressing the button on the joystick if I start to masturbate. But if I press the button on the joystick, will the screen freeze-frame? Would some nurse waltz in and see me on the screen—a close-up on the action? That would be worse.

I close my eyes. But then there’s a knock on the audio, some scrambling noises. I open my eyes. Madge is at the top of the stairs. I can only see her ankles—which reminds me of seeing them in the pool, underwater, last summer. But this time she’s wearing her ultrasuede comfortable shoes—the ones she’s just started buying. They’re expensive and bulky and unattractive.

“I’m home,” Madge says.

“How did it go?” future-me asks.

“She’s doing well,” Madge says. “I figure she’ll be ready for the intensive training in two weeks or so.” Madge doesn’t walk down the steps. She’s frozen up there. I lean forward on the examination table, as if I can see more with an upward angle. Madge says in a hushed voice, “Good girl. Stay.”

And now I can hear the nails clicking on the kitchen linoleum. Madge is training an actual dog. She’d mentioned this once a while back—something about seeing-eye dogs. We’d seen a woman with one at the movies. Madge isn’t cheating on me. She’s turned into a good person. And I’m a masturbator, possibly a chronic one. Lovely. The worst part is that Madge refuses to walk down the stairs to actually look at me.

“Godfrey,” she says. “Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”

Future-me shakes his head; his eyes go wet. This isn’t a fake moment. He presses the tears out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. He clears his throat. “What?” he says. “I’m fine. We didn’t even really get along. You know that.” I know that this is about my mother again. She’s dead. I can feel it.

There’s a long pause and then Madge quietly says, “Okay, then. Okay.” Her ultrasuedes turn on the stairs and disappear.

TH
E SCREEN
REVERTS TO
snow. I am sitting there in my paper gown, all of the gear still firmly in place on my head, holding the joystick midair. My future with Madge is worse than metal detectors on the beach—at least in that scenario there’s a beach. What am I going to say to Madge at lunch? What is she seeing at Plotniks? Does she know that I’m a chronic masturbator who hits on teenage girls and has gelled hair? I wonder if Madge will cry. I hate it when she cries. Is this the end of our relationship? Are we calling off the engagement? Were we even engaged to begin with? She has the ring, but she’s not wearing it. Is it possible to be halfway engaged? Would we be calling off our almost engagement? I feel relief over not telling my parents about the proposal. I’d hate to have to explain this.
Th
is.
My mother is going to die fairly young. She only has fifteen years. No one needs to know that.

But now that I know that my mother is going to die, there’s a tender swelling in my chest—an undying love for her.
All mothers die,
I tell myself, trying to stop the ache, but it doesn’t do any good. In spite of the bad news of Madge in her hardy shoes and me in the basement with lotion and my mother’s death, or because of it, I feel alive—awful but fully alive. My skin is warm, fresh. The hairs on my neck are standing up. My heartbeat has made it all the way up in my ears.

I push the button on the joystick to call in a nurse. Moments later, the examination room door flies open. But it’s not Dr. Chin or a nurse. It’s the woman from the waiting room who lost her license. She snagged an appointment after all. She’s barefoot, wearing her own paper gown—one hand on the knob, one hand holding together the gown in the back. “What in the hell are you doing in my room?” she asks.

I look around. “This is my room,” I say.

She glances over her shoulder to the number on the exam room door: 3. “Oh,” she says, “I have a lousy sense of direction.” And then she glances at my spread legs and short paper gown. “You might want to . . .” And she makes a little gesture like she’s closing a book.

I bring my knees together, trying not to blush. “Well, if you weren’t in here . . .” I say.

She looks like she’s about to burst with laughter. She’s wearing the paper gown but also a dainty silver choker with a little doodad that’s bobbing with choked laughter. “So sorry,” she says, showing the thin gap in her two front teeth. Then, recovering, she points to the television. “Addictive, isn’t it?”

I think it might be,
I want to tell her—my knees pressed so tightly together I can feel my blood clipping quickly through my body. But the woman has already shut the door. I miss her immediately, and then I think of Mart Thigpen. My love of women is an animal love.

I push the button on the joystick again and wait.

As the drugs settle into my bloodstream, it feels like my body is a raft on the Mississippi under an incubator-bright, incubator-warm sun. I say, “Godfrey Burkes, Godfrey Burkes, Godfrey Burkes. What’s a Godfrey Burkes?” I think of him pulling my license from my lips and then in the examination room staring at me like that — like what? I don’t know, maybe in a way that’s quite typical of a Godfrey Burkes.

But I’m not here to see my future with Godfrey Burkes.

I have run through a list of people I loved or almost loved or should have loved or failed to love enough. I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t broken up with or allowed myself to be broken up with by someone who would have been perfect for me under different circumstances, which might include now and/or ten years from now. None of those futures panned out. Some were flaming disasters; others featured plenty of embittered wreckage that I recognized from my parents’ broken marriage; and some were what I would simply call a stalemate—no one throwing down, just lots of stubborn resignation.

And so, with my past clearly behind me, I’m moving on to present possibilities—no matter how farfetched, including one session with my landlord’s younger brother, Teddy, who came by to unclog a drain once.

I hear the ambient noise of a crowd. The monitor reveals that Jason Binter and I are at a mall, but I hate malls, or at least the now-me hates malls: the recycled circulated air, the two lanes to walk back and forth but nobody can figure out which way is back and which is forth what with all the old people doing laps.

I could have a not-weird future, right? I’m capable of that. Maybe it’s even something to aspire to. And, so far, so good. Binter and I are here, together, at a mall—being not weird at all.

And I quickly remind myself that it’s too easy for things to start so well. That could be the first line to the memoir I’ll never write:
It’s too easy for things to start so well.

At the top of the staircase, Jason turns around. Even through the fuzz, he looks like he did the last time I saw him, about a week ago, pawing through African American sheet music. Maybe his frat-boy vibe transcends aging.

“Do you want a pretzel?” I ask him. I point to what I assume is an Auntie Anne’s pretzel kiosk, if those are still around fifteen years from now; the sign above the pretzel kiosk looks like it’s covered in a mirage. “Something cinnamon maybe?”

Jason opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

It was a simple question. I ask again, “Do you want a pretzel?”

But his mouth—just nothing. Is he thinking over the existential crisis of salt or no salt, to splurge on a side of icing? Adrian couldn’t shut the fuck up; Jason can’t seem to get himself started.

“Carbs,” he finally says, shaking his head.

Jason doesn’t eat carbs. This is bad. I love bread. My favorite food groups go cheese, bread, cheese bread, and soup served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread.

Half of the mall is blurred because of brand merchandising. Half of the nonblurred parts of the mall are foggy anyway, because this is the future and the future seems insecure in completely showing itself. I sympathize.

I wonder which mall this is. It’s so blurred I could have been here a thousand times and wouldn’t know it. I try to find a specific landmark: a fountain, maybe that hallway I dipped into to kiss Josh Teerman through most of middle school, but nothing.

The session is briefly interrupted—I’ve gotten used to these advertisements. This one is to adopt a baby from a third-world country by way of Chin’s adoption program.

And then I’m back at the mall. Jason and I have wandered to a kiosk selling nail buffers. We’re discussing the pros and cons of buffed nails. We also discuss, in no particular order and with no depth and/or irony, painting a living room beige or off-beige, which is different from ecru; a couple who wants to join our bunco group, but the wife lacks a filter and sometimes states things she shouldn’t—for example, that her male collie often gets humped at the dog park by girl dogs, which strikes us as completely inappropriate conversation for our bunco crowd; a brief comparison of kitchen appliance brands; the benefits of galoshes; and why we love Crate and Barrel.

I realize quickly that this conversation represents a long, slow death in suburbia, the quiet suffering of the imaginationless masses, the soul dulled by commercialism. We might as well be screaming
We’re dead! We’re dead! We’re dead!
Or, better yet, stuffed and arranged in a display case of a mall—beside a tiny nail-buffer kiosk—by Fadra the taxidermist!

I look down at my ring finger. The diamond is the size of my knuckle. I would never wear anything this gaudy. I bet this future-me doesn’t ride a bike; instead, she opts for an elliptical in an air-conditioned gym while reading
Us Weekly.
I realize I’m being judgmental, which feels bitchy even though it’s self-directed.

Then I look through the glass storefront of a clothing store and see a fogged and pale version of a self I do not ever want to know. I’m in better shape than I am now; I’m tan in an orangey way; my face is slightly injected. Binter has rubbed off so hard on me that I look like an aged sorority girl.

And beside me, there’s someone else. Not Jason Binter at all. There’s a man wearing . . . a white knee-length sundress? I can’t really make out his face, but I see that he’s handsome, maybe even honest-looking. Could it be a paper gown? Is this some escaped mental patient? My future self turns, away from the reflection, to the man himself, but he’s gone.

My future self rubs her eyes. This is a strange mall. She runs to catch up with Jason. Who is she? Do people make us who we are or is every future possibility just different pieces of the same self ?

The screen goes to snow, and I actually whisper a thank-you.

But this blank screen is my least favorite part of the day. Some would say the future never ends because it hasn’t happened yet, but that’s bullshit. They’ve obviously never sat in this chair.

Dr. Chin pops in after a few seconds. “How’d it go?”

“I can cross him off the list.” I swipe an imaginary pen through the air. “Jason Binter, gone. See, so easy.” There’s a feeling of relief that I’ve narrowed down the possible futures that endlessly splinter out in front of myself. I’m pruning, and eventually there will be one future in front of me—obvious and clear and knowable.

“This is your fourth time in two weeks, and you’re not following the healthiest pattern.”

It’s actually my fifth time, but I don’t correct him. “What pattern?”

“Usually clients get exasperated, completely fed up. Heartbroken. They’re ready to storm out of here if they haven’t already. You, on the other hand, seem
excited.
Almost renewed by each failure.”

“Well, there
are
three billion men out there, I think—ballpark figure.”

He squints. “It might be better if this is your last appointment.”

“That seems like a bad business model,” I joke, but inside I feel a rise of panic.

“There’ve been cases of this,” he says. “Studies done.”

“Of
this
? What’s
this
?”

“We call them—we call you—the Obsessives.”

I want to laugh, tell him it sounds kind of badass, something out of a S. E. Hinton novel. Or maybe from a Broadway musical:
Th
e Obsessives
—we’ll sing before we cut you, but we’ll cut you bad, bad I tell you. “Do we get name tags, a tattoo for every failed envisioning?” I try to smile, but he’s not buying. “Look, I’m curious, sure, but hardly obsessive.”

Dr. Chin rubs his neck—the front first, working his way to the back, under the collar of his dress shirt. I feel like I’m doing something wrong. “We could argue semantics all day, but your insurance only covers so much. Plus, you shouldn’t get in any deeper.”

“You make it sound like a cult.”

“It might be worse,” he says. His hand is still rubbing the back of his neck. “There’s no Kool-Aid at the end.”

“What is at the end?”

“Trust me, it’s not pretty. The future, the desire to know it and feel it—that desire can swallow you whole.”

“Look, I’m a nice, well-adjusted girl,” I say, and everything’s relative. “Worst-case scenario, I just run out of men.”

“Do you have a career goal? I mean, is there something else you’d like to do with yourself ?”

“Are you insinuating that I’m just boy crazy?”

“We do get a lot of that here.”

“I’m a feminist.”

“I’m not sure what that means anymore.”

“I love my job and . . .” And what? And I was born in a generation where girls should be ambitious and men shouldn’t matter. I’m of a generation of girls pushed into science and math, encouraged to play violent video games to subvert stereotypes, a generation fast outpacing boys in college entrance and graduation stats. A generation of women for whom men are optional, unnecessary, purely decorative. Still, I want a real love. I believe love matters. I want it to matter and to be true and to build a family with that love—the kind of family I was cheated out of as a kid. “I’m human. I still believe in love. Aren’t we wired for it? Aren’t you?”

Chin draws in a deep breath and then lets it out. “You know, people were happy before all of this.” He points to the cheap screen, the shoddy B-movie alien helmet. “There was me and my wife. And for you there
will be
whoever it is you’re supposed to end up with.”

“ ‘For time and the world do not stand still,’ ” I say. “ ‘Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.’ ”

Chin looks up for a moment and then says, “JFK, right?”

I nod.

“Maybe you should try a little Buddha. ‘Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future—’ ”

“I know,” I say. “Buddha’s a real stickler about the present, a real
obsessive
about it, some might say.”

“And JFK didn’t get much future, did he?”

I sigh. “No, he didn’t.”

“Look, I just want you to be sure about your next session. Don’t come back until you need to come back. You hear me? You don’t want to be put on probation.”

“Probation? But I could always go to another envisionist.”

“Nope, we’ve got a system. When you’re blacklisted, we all know it.”

“You can’t do that to people, can you?”

“We can,” Chin says, “so just take it easy.”

“I’m not obsessive. I just happen to live in a time in history when one can see the romantic future. I refuse to apologize for taking advantage of my time and place in history!”

He picks my chart off the table. “Look, it could be worse,” he says, but I don’t know how it could be worse because he’s already left the room.

I put my clothes back on slowly, as if I’m relearning how to be real-life again, how to not watch myself do something I haven’t done yet. I walk out of the room feeling sick and dizzy. What would happen if I got blacklisted? The idea of not coming back makes my head feel lighter than a balloon, taut like it’s ready to pop.