10 (2 page)

The presence of the future

The absence of the future

*   *   *

We were coconstructing a shoe-box diorama to accompany the book Roberto and I planned to self-publish about the scientific confusion regarding the brontosaurus: in the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he'd discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time. Roberto was an eight-year-old in my friend Aaron's third-grade class at a dual-language school in Sunset Park. I had asked Aaron if there was some way I could be of use to one of his charges while also smuggling in occasional Spanish practice. Roberto was intelligent and sociable, but even more susceptible to distraction than the average child, and Aaron thought our working on a series of projects after school might trick him into, or at least model for him, modes of concentration. I had no official permission to be in the school, although Aaron had asked Roberto's mom—emphasizing that I was a published author—if she was comfortable with the prospect, and she was.

During our first session, Roberto had a nut-related allergic reaction to the granola bars I'd brought but failed to clear with Aaron and, as the boy crimsoned and wheezed, smiling all the while, I was seized with animal terror; I imagined having to open his windpipe with a pencil. Luckily, Aaron returned from his meeting in an adjacent classroom and calmed me down, explaining Roberto's allergy was minor and the reaction would soon pass, but that I should be careful in the future; he didn't know I was bringing a snack. The third or fourth week of tutoring, when Aaron was again out of the room, Roberto, without warning, mutinied, informing me he was going to find his friends and, since I wasn't his teacher, I couldn't stop him. He bolted down the hall and I walked quickly after him, cheeks burning with an embarrassment I feared any adult witnesses would confuse for a species of lechery. I eventually located him in the corner of the gym that was also the cafeteria, in a small circle of his classmates that had formed around a truly gargantuan water bug carcass, and I lured Roberto back to the classroom only by promising I'd let him play with my iPhone.

By now, the third month of tutoring, we were close friends: for snack I brought fresh fruit he never ate and Aaron had had Roberto's mom threaten the child about disobeying me. In the initial aftermath of my diagnosis, when every few minutes I believed I was dissecting, the time I spent trying to coax Roberto into focusing on the mythology of the kraken or recently discovered prehistoric shark remains was the only time in which I was myself distracted from the potentially fatal swelling at my sinus of Valsalva.

Thus only a few days after the Marfan evaluation I was again in a child-sized chair, cutting out with those awkward elementary school scissors various dinosaurs we'd printed off the Internet onto construction paper to serve as prey or companion for the apatosaurus in the diorama, no doubt anachronistically, as we hadn't the patience to determine which dinosaurs corresponded to what geological period, when Roberto returned to a subject that had entered his dreams since he'd watched a show on the Discovery Channel about the advent of a second ice age.

“When all the skyscrapers freeze they're going to fall down like September eleventh,” he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, “and crush everyone.” Roberto tended to modulate not tone but volume to indicate gravity and emotion.

“Maybe if it started getting really cold the scientists would figure out a new heating system for the buildings,” I said.

“But global warming,” he said, smiling and showing the gap where he was awaiting a mature incisor, but almost whispering, a sign of genuine fear.

“I don't think there will be another ice age,” I lied, cutting out another extinct animal.

“You don't believe in global warming?” he asked.

I paused. “I don't think buildings are going to fall on anybody,” I said. “Did you have another dream?”

“In my bad dream what happens is Joseph Kony is coming for me, and—”

“Joseph Kony?”

“The bad guy from Africa, from the movie.”

“What do you know about Joseph Kony?”

“I saw a YouTube about him and about how he was killing all the people in Africa.”

“Why would Joseph Kony come to Brooklyn? What's that have to do with global warming?”

“What happens in my bad dream is the buildings all freeze up after global warming makes an ice age and the prisons crack open too and then all the killers get out through the cracks and come after us and Joseph Kony comes after us and we have to escape to San Salvador but they have helicopters and night vision and anyway we don't have
papeles
so we can't get anywhere.” He stopped cutting and put his chin on the table, then his forehead.

An increasingly frequent vertiginous sensation like a transient but thorough agnosia in which the object in my hand, this time a green pair of safety scissors, ceases to be a familiar tool and becomes an alien artifact, thereby estranging the hand itself, a condition brought on by the intuition of spatial and temporal collapse or, paradoxically, an overwhelming sense of its sudden integration, as when a Ugandan warlord appears via YouTube in an undocumented Salvadorean child's Brooklyn-based dream of a future wrecked by dramatically changing weather patterns and an imperial juridical system that dooms him to statelessness; Roberto, like me, tended to figure the global apocalyptically.

I asked him to look at me and then promised him in two languages the only thing I could: he had nothing to fear from Joseph Kony.

After I presented Roberto to his mother, Anita, in front of the school, first asking permission to buy us both churros from a silver-haired woman wrapped in a bright red blanket, one of the many vendors who appeared whenever the school day or the after-school sessions ended, selling churros in all weather and helado in warm, beautiful children swarming them, more material vibrancy and intergenerational exchange and linguistic diversity in this brief public than I had perceived during my entire childhood in Topeka, I did not, as was my habit, begin the long walk home, but instead reentered the building, drawn there by a subtle force. The school had emptied quickly; with the exception of a custodian and a superobese security guard with whom I exchanged a ritual nod, the only remaining inhabitants were a few teachers ensconced in their rooms, applying adhesive stars or planning lessons or replacing cedar shavings in wire cages, presences I could intuit as I began wandering the halls, running a hand along the construction paper autumnalia: foliage changing its Crayola, horns of plenty, turkeys whose bodies were formed by tracing multifingered extremities.

Do you know what I mean if I say that when I reached the second floor and disposed of the wax paper, I was in Randolph Elementary School and seven, the wall hangings now letters addressed to Christa McAuliffe in exaggerated cursive, wishing her luck on the
Challenger
mission, which was only a couple of months in the future? I pass through Mrs. Greiner's door and find my desk, the chair no longer small for me, Pluto among the planets in the Styrofoam mobile suspended from the ceiling. My parents are at the Menninger Clinic; my older brother is in a classroom directly above mine; Joseph Kony is just coming to prominence as the leader of a premillennialist force; my aorta may or may not be proportional; the radiator sputters in the corner because November in the past is often cold. The classroom isn't empty, but its presences are flickering: Daniel appears at the desk beside mine, Daniel whose arms are always a patchwork of Peanuts Band-Aids and minor hematomas, who will go to the emergency room this spring for inhaling a jelly bean—on my dare—dangerously deep into his nose, who in middle school will become the first of us to smoke, but at the time is known for his habit of surreptitiously ingesting Domino sugar packets. It is sad work to build a diorama of the future with a boy you know will hang himself for whatever complex of reasons in his parents' basement at nineteen, but that work has been assigned, Mrs. Greiner standing over us to check our progress, the synthetic coconut odor of her lotion intermingling with the smell of rubber cement. I'll make Daniel's effigy and he'll make mine, but we'll coconstruct the spacecraft, letting it dangle like a modifier from a string, perpetually disintegrating.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The
Challenger
crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

Pulling us into the future

*   *   *

An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York. The mayor took unprecedented steps: he divided the city into zones and mandated evacuations from the lower-lying ones; he announced the subway system would shut down before the storm made landfall; parts of lower Manhattan might be preemptively taken off the grid. Some speculated that the mayor, having been criticized for his slow response to a record-setting snowstorm the previous winter, was strategically overreacting, making an exaggerated show of preparedness, but his tone at the increasingly frequent press conferences seemed to express less somber authority than genuine anxiety, as if he were among those he kept imploring to stay calm.

From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and the stout-bodied passerines, inflecting traffic patterns and the “improved sycamores,” so called because they're hybridized for urban living. I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swirled. There were myriad apps to track it, the Doppler color-coded to indicate the intensity of precipitation, the same technology they'd utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.

Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs. At Canal Street the three of us were joined by a teenager whose body seemed smaller than the cello case strapped to her back. She explained that the doomsday hype was designed to evacuate lower Manhattan so police could install bugs and other listening devices in every apartment. We stopped talking when a mariachi band composed of three men in their twenties, one of whom wore embroidered straight-cut muslin pants, struck up “Toda Una Vida.” It was hard to tell if they played particularly well or if we passengers were, in the glow of our increasing sociability, particularly disposed to appreciate them, or music generally. Regardless, there was an unusual quantity of pathos in the song, applause, then an unusual quantity of currency in the hat.