The Future for Curious People: A Novel (11 page)

As if we’re on a timer, Godfrey and I take off our shoes.

“On three?” Godfrey says. He looks at the pool.

I can feel my heart pulse through my fingertips. I wasn’t supposed to have this session. Desperation Fridays. It’s too much. I wasted a mani-pedi coupon on this? I had to pay for this incredible eruption of feelings?

“How about right now?” future-me says, and then we’re off, running straight for the pool.

Right before Godfrey and I jump, I press my thumb on the panic button. I press it again and again and then I close my eyes and press down on the button as hard as I can.

WHEN I OPEN MY
eyes, the screen is blank, but I still see fragments of things: clouds that have fallen to the ground and hopped away, Godfrey’s tears,
my
tears, colors too aching to actually be colors, a constant tilt. I see streaks of light if I move my head too quickly, probably aftereffects of the medicine. I’ve never ended a session early—there wasn’t even time for a commercial—so I don’t know what I should be feeling. I’m groggy and yet there’s buzzing in my chest. How can one future feel so intense and beautiful and sad all at once. I feel . . .
seized.
And everything around me is still a bit off, surreal. Maybe the screen is broken (this is Dr. Chin, after all) and that’s why the colors were fucked up and once that was off, everything was derailed—a jagged spill into some emotionally complex world that can’t possibly truly exist.

Plus, I can’t swim. I never learned. There were lessons, sure, but I couldn’t ever get over my fear. But that’s not the reason I pushed the button. No. Why did I press the button? I was happy, but it was too much. We were wearing black—was someone dead? Who was dead? This future had too many questions. What I need are answers.

It feels like I’ve been sitting here for hours. Everything connected to me is numb except for my thumb, which has taken on a dull ache. My thumb is still pressed down on the panic button. It’s lost all color. I let my thumb slide off the button.

I feel awful—am I pale and panting? I scan the room. I’m still alone. “Hello?” I say a little too quietly. I sound hollow. I don’t know where that voice came from. I find myself embarrassed for it.

I look back at the blank screen. How did I feel Godfrey’s hand like it was right here and not fifteen years away?

The stillness of everything makes me even more uncomfortable.

“Hello?” I say again, a little louder, less hollow.

Nothing.

I can’t just sit still. The images won’t leave—Godfrey’s stiff frame, our tears, the clearest sky. I lean forward until I can reach the keyboard.
Any boy,
I tell myself.
I just need a name.
I want a safe future. And that’s when I think of Adam Greenberg in his sweater vest. It’s not because I really want anything romantic to happen between us. I don’t. It’s just that he feels like a future that could fit in a tidy box.

I can just test it and see if he still wears his green-framed glasses in his late thirties. Will they still make sweater vests fifteen years from now?

I type A-d-a-m G-r-e-e-n-b-e-r-g and press Enter. I look at the screen. Nothing happens. I wait. Still, nothing.

Did I spell his name wrong? The meds are still pulsing through my system, so it’s possible. I need someone else. I can’t think of anyone. I’ve already used up most of my college prospects. Everything is blank. Maybe high school?

It hits me: Mark Standing. He was a senior when I was just a freshman. Girls would have sleepovers just to talk about him. Mothers thought about him when they slept with their husbands. College girls dated him while he was still in high school. Mark Standing. Yes! The wavy brown hair, the guitar he kept in his backseat even though we never saw him play it.

What could be simpler and more reliable than choosing the hunky guy from high school—the one every girl picks?

Before the fog completely rolls in, I type M-a-r-k S-t-a-n-d-i-n-g. I hit Enter.

FIFTEEN YEARS FROM NOW,
I look like a lion while I sleep, a lion curled up to Mark Standing’s fine form. My hair is curled everywhere, some of it spilling across his chest. My hair is very blonde. His hair is still wavy, though it’s begun its recession. He looks like he tastes like a sledgehammer, but in a good way. He’s stayed fit, Mr. Standing has. We both sleep naked. I think about horseback riding.

There are clouds in the bedroom, a fog, dew on the sheets. Future-me doesn’t notice; she’s still asleep. There are birds outside and they want everyone to know they exist. I’m thinking it’s spring.

Watching myself sleep curled next to Mark makes me feel warm. I imagine myself sleeping in this bed forever. Nothing in this envisioning freaks me out. I’ve stopped sweating.

I am about to fall asleep with Mark and my future self when I hear a bang. Two bangs. Too many bangs. It sounds like a door, probably the front door, since the sound is too far away to be the bedroom door. But these aren’t normal knocks—they’re angry knocks.

Then a crack. I think of the show
Cops
—
that
kind of crack.

I lean forward watching my future self jolt up in bed. She holds the covers up to her neck. Thirty-eight-year-old me, lion-mane-haired, glowing an unnatural shade of sun and lit fog, eyes darting back and forth.

Mark barely stirs.

The bedroom door swings open. This wakes up Mark. He looks confused until he sees Adam Greenberg standing in the bedroom.

What the fuck is Adam Greenberg doing in my future bedroom?

Everyone looks scared now except for Adam Greenberg, who’s angry. I’ve never seen him like this before, which is a shock in itself. He’s also not wearing a sweater vest, instead opting for a V-neck undershirt—still something organic, I’m sure. No glasses either. I knew that shit wasn’t prescription.

Adam is holding something in his right hand. It’s fuzzy, so it takes a second for me to focus. Is that a gun? That’s a gun! Silver, large, mean. He’s pointing it at Mark and then at future-me before bringing it back to Mark.

Eventually, he lets the gun linger between the two.

“Dot’s in jail!” The gun is shaking or maybe everything on the screen is shaking. Who can tell anymore?

“That wasn’t our fault.” Mark’s trying to be calm, but he’s up against the headboard, the covers draped around his waist.

“The bank was your idea!” Adam says. His pitch gets a little higher with every word. I’ve seen enough movies to know that’s not a good thing.

Future-me is whimpering as quietly as possible.

What about Dot and jail? There is so much fog in this bedroom. Did someone leave one of the windows open and it just let itself roll in?

“You left her there,” Adam says. “You just drove away.”

“We had no choice,” future-me says. “Someone tripped the alarm.” I sound ragged, like I’ve been chain-smoking. Future-me isn’t looking at Adam when she talks—her face is staring straight down at the bedsheets.

I’ve seen this gun before. It’s the same one Clint Eastwood used in
Dirty Harry.

“You didn’t have a choice, and now I don’t either,” Adam says. He cocks the gun. Mark raises his hands. I hear someone calling my name. It’s coming from outside. I run to the open window still naked, thrust my head out, and look down on a small yard.

There’s Godfrey, wearing the same black suit from the last session. He shouts, “I know I shouldn’t be here, but I need to see you, Evelyn!”

Mark Standing shouts, “It can’t be that fucker! At my house? On my lawn?” He rushes at Greenberg, quickly twisting the gun from his grip, and still naked, too, he runs to the window, pushing me out of the way.

Mark takes aim. “Who the fuck do you think you are? She’s my wife, goddammit!”

Before he can pull the trigger, I scream loudly. Love and fear swarming in my chest again, I hit the panic button with my thumb. Fear and love. I keep screaming as I slam my thumb down over and over on the panic button.

Dr. Chin rushes into the room just as the screen goes blank.

I’m breathlessly pressing the panic button. “What the hell!” I shout. “What the hell!”

And then Chin puts his hands on his hips and frowns.

“Don’t blacklist me,” I say. “Please don’t blacklist me!”

There are two Dr. Plotniks. Dr. Plotnik and his wife, Dr. Plotnik. She goes by Dr. A. Plotnik in an effort to reduce confusion. Dr. A. Plotnik specializes in reformatting romantic futures. Madge is explaining all of this in the bar called Fast Eddy’s, which is near Fontana’s. We’re sharing a booth with Bart and Amy, who strike me as unbearably glib, and Gunston from work. Sometimes when I see Gunston out in the wild like this, set loose from his cubicle, I feel guilty for stamping him with an
UNCLAIMED
stamp while he was sleeping. Gunston is unclaimed with no prospects of getting claimed in the near future. But what’s the difference between me and Gunston? Once upon a time, Madge found me and saved me. That’s all. Here I am, sitting next to her, and with Gunston here, I feel lucky.
Claimed.
Though she’s still not wearing the ring. And, believe me, I know that some other men would have asked her for the ring back. “Wear it or give it back!” they would demand, but if she gives it back then I feel like I’m one step further away from being engaged and I don’t want the ground to just keep eroding under my feet. I’m trying to hold on to what I’ve got—a girlfriend who has the ring in her possession, if not on her finger, is better—to my mind—than one who’s given it back. There’s some logic to this.

Gunston is looking out the window.

It’s a loud place. TVs stationed in the upper corners, guitar riffs screaming overhead, a noisy crowd. Rumor has it there’d been an area in the back room devoted to a mechanical bull, but the insurance had been too high and the era passed. I have my cell phone on me again without ever having to confess its temporary loss to Madge, which feels like I dodged detention. I had to claw through the bins in Lost Cell Phones for quite a while, and now that it’s back I feel rooted again—not a bad thing, all in all.

“We didn’t need any romantic reformatting,” Amy says.

“Lucky, I guess,” Bart adds.

“I don’t think we should talk about our private life in public,” I say, glancing at Gunston.

“Like he cares,” Madge says.

Gunston taps on the glass-front window, trying to get the attention of a young woman at the bus stop.

“Don’t tap the glass, Gunston,” Madge says. “They don’t like it.”

“But she almost looked over,” Gunston says. “I mean, she hears something. She’s just not sure where it’s coming from.”

The woman at the bus stop is kind of beautiful. Her skirt is too short for the cold and I love the way she’s hugging herself and stomping her feet to keep warm—innocent but sexy. I could probably watch her be cold forever, which sounds kind of mean and, yes, Thigpennish.

“I’m excited about it,” Madge says, returning to the topic at hand. “I can’t wait to meet Dr. A. Plotnik. It’s all fascinating.”

“It’s a racket,” I say flatly.

“Don’t,” Madge says.

Amy and Bart lean back in their seats, a unified gesture of shocked disapproval.

“You have to admit,” I say, “it’s a little convenient that Dr. Plotnik shows people bleak futures and then prescribes romantic reformatting, which his wife just happens to specialize in.”

“I’d like to be romantically reformatted,” Gunston says as the bus pulls away from the curb, taking the woman with it.

“You have to have a partner first,” Amy explains.

“That seems backward,” Gunston says.

“We’re going to Dr. A. Plotnik,” Madge says. “We’re going and that’s it.”

“We don’t have to,” I say, but I don’t think anyone can really hear me, just as my voice echoed in the dream I had last night, how it was swallowed by the glassed-in swimming pool. I remember the woman from Dr. Chin’s in her rubber swimming cap and nose pinch.

Bart leans forward with his hand spread on the table. “Godfrey, listen to her.”

Madge has gone flushed. “We’re going,” she says again. “Because it’s a great way to better understand ourselves and because it’s our only hope.” She wipes her nose, pushes herself from the booth, and rushes to the ladies’ room.

“Why did you do that?” Amy says.

Madge had been so full of bravado at the restaurant, talking about the new way of life and all of that, that I wasn’t sure if she’d been disappointed at all. But she must have been actually feeling a little desperate. Knowing that Madge sees this as our last hope gives me some necessary hope.

“Go after her,” Bart says.

“Don’t go after her,” Gunston says.

“You should,” Amy says.

“She’s in the ladies’ room,” I tell them.

“Knock on the door,” Amy says. “Tell her you’re sorry.”

I stand up, walk slowly to the ladies’ room, hoping Madge will pop out before I have to knock.

She doesn’t.

Standing in front of the door, I look back at the table. Bart makes a knocking gesture. Gunston gives me the finger for no good reason.

I look at the door and knock. “Madge,” I say. “I’m sorry. We’ll go. Of course we’ll go. C’mon. Are you okay?”

The door opens, and here stands Madge with fresh lipstick on. “It isn’t a racket,” she says.

I stare at her. This is an ultimatum. I have to choose correctly. This may cost me the engagement, actually. I can’t help but be very disappointed in life at this moment: the embarrassing fact that big decisions can come just like so, standing outside of the ladies’ room at Fast Eddy’s.

“It isn’t a racket,” I say, a stab in my chest. It’s the right thing to do, I’m fairly sure, but I can’t help the feeling of immediate and deep regret. It’s like giving to a charity only because people are looking on. But I’m pretty sure that Madge isn’t the one who’s the charity case. I am. In this relationship, I always have been and probably always will be.

TH
E PLOTNIKS’ CLINIC—
MEETING ALL
of Your Future Needs—is sleek, streamlined, falsely pine-scented as if from an air freshener that dangles from a rearview mirror, but a nice air freshener, top of the line, in a very nice car, imported from somewhere where everyone is blond and happy.

The children in the waiting room choose from bookshelves filled with handheld computer games. The adults are well groomed. They read untattered copies of
Time
and
Vanity Fair
and the
New Yorker
and glance at their watches with immediacy. The fish tank is massive, clean, and built into the wall. There’s a ceiling-hung flat screen television playing preprogrammed health news—a coifed woman behind a desk describes the pros of envisioning treatments for the elderly.

No one is holding a dog or digging for their license. The clinic doesn’t smell like deep-fried takeout. I can fairly assume that Plotnik’s machines are not coin-ops.

“This place is nice,” I say, propping my elbows on the armrests.

Madge looks at me a little bewildered. “It’s a doctor’s waiting room.”

“A nice one, though,” I say.

Madge shrugs.

We’re called to the reception desk to fill out forms. The receptionist is in her forties but is wearing braces—the kind that are almost invisible. She smiles so happily that I find myself thinking,
Good for you, opting for straighter teeth at your age
. It seems like an accomplishment of great self-esteem. Another receptionist is taking calls. There’s no mention of notarizing or euthanizing or lancing.

I try not to act amazed by it all. I almost confide in Madge how bad it was at Dr. Chin’s, but for some reason, I feel protective of Chin, and I don’t want to badmouth him. Plus, my session worked. I saw my future with Madge—clear as anything—and Chin had offered me a deal. I haven’t told Madge about
that.
She might take it the wrong way—me shuffling through futures with my ex-girlfriends. It’s just an experiment, really, a bet I’ve got going with Chin, if nothing else. Why get into it?

Madge and I are escorted back and then we’re standing in the middle of the room, which has a wooden desk with a chair on wheels, bookshelves filled with actual books filled with actual words, two tall plants and three armchairs.

“I never know where to sit in these kinds of situations,” I say. “It’s like the first test you get to fail.” I move toward one of the chairs.

“Not there,” Madge says. “That’s her chair. It would be a power play if you sat in it.”

“How can you tell it’s her chair?”

Madge looks at the other two. “I don’t know,” she says.

“They’re all so fucking equidistant,” I say.

Madge shakes her head. “Don’t swear. This is probably being recorded.”

I walk over to one of the tall potted plants. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I say into the closet branch. “Testing. Fuck.”

“C’mon,” Madge says. “Be serious.”

I whisper to the plant, its leaves, its branches, “I am being fucking serious.”

Just then, Dr. A. Plotnik swoops in. I jump away from the plant. Madge sticks out her hand.

“I’m Madge and this is Godfrey.”

“Welcome,” Dr. A. Plotnik says placidly. She’s a dry woman, somewhat brittle, wearing an oversized blazer with shoulder pads that accentuate her poor posture counterproductively. Her cheeks have pouches as if she’s hiding something there, like acorns or sugar cubes or the secrets of the brokenhearted. But she’s pretty in a papery way. She turns to her desk and says over one of her hunched shoulder, “Have a seat.”

Madge and I look at each other and then at the armchairs. I start to sit in one, but Madge waves me off, then points. I move to the one Madge has indicated. We both finally sit down.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Dr. A. Plotnik says. “Romantic reformatting is a real commitment.” She sits in the third armchair and smiles at us. There’s no seating reorganization necessary. We’ve passed the first test. I feel a surge of confidence. Madge and I are a good team.

“We’re ready,” Madge says.

Dr. A. Plotnik looks at me expectantly.

I nod. “We are,” I say. “Absolutely.”

Dr. A. Plotnik only partially smiles this time, as if reserving the right to be disappointed in me in the near future. “I use a method called positive memory concentration,” she says. “Couples who foster positive recollections of their early relationship are actually creating a positive mythology, and these couples are seven times more likely to stay in their relationships and nearly three times more likely to describe the current state of their relationship as ‘happy’ then the group who reported ‘rarely’ or ‘almost never happy.’ ”

“That’s fascinating,” Madge says.

“Positive memory concentration helps couples foster positive recollections of the early formative budding of their relationships.”

I say, “What about the couples who meet in prison or during a war or working together at the DMV?”

“I don’t understand,” Dr. A. Plotniks says.

“It’s a joke,” Madge says, scowling at me. “He’s trying to be funny.”

I’m not joking. “I mean, what if a couple doesn’t have any real positive recollections of the early part of their relationship?”

“Ah, I see. You’re trying to break the ice with something humorous,” Dr. A. Plotnik says condescendingly.

“Not really,” I say.

“If you have to explain a joke, it isn’t one,” Madge says, under her breath. “I’ve told you that.”

“Sorry,” I say. “We can just move on.”

“No,” Dr. A. Plotnik says, with a knotted expression of deep concern and psychological know-how. “I think that your ‘joke’ is actually exposing an underlying fear. Are you worried that you won’t be able to come up with positive recollections of your early relationship with Madge?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I can come up with plenty.”

“Like what?” Madge asks.

“Like . . .” I’m thinking of the first time she let me have sex with her. It was supposed to be very romantic. I tipped over a candle and burned a hole in her sofa. I decide not to mention it. Sex would be too animalistic, and Madge was pissed about the burned hole. “Like when we ate tacos on our first date,” I say. “And the waitress didn’t speak English very well. She was great, wasn’t she?”

Dr. A. Plotnik turns to Madge. “Was that a positive memory?”

“I think it’s a positive memory of the waitress,” Madge says.

Dr. A. Plotnik sighs. “I understand,” she says to Madge. “I have plenty of positive recollections of my early relationship with Dr. Plotnik,” she says. “Plenty. But he’s always fuzzy on the details, and he has a little ADD and so his mind wanders in the middle of a session. And can I blame him for having a dysfunction? No, I cannot. I’m a woman of science.” And this is the moment when something inside of Dr. A. Plotnik fissures. She slams a hand down on her thigh which, for such a contained woman, can only be described as a gesture of pure outrage. “But when he gave me a Moleskine journal three days ago—a late birthday present—which . . . don’t even get me started on. I spend thirty birthdays with him and he still can’t remember
not
to pick up a sixteen-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent journal from Target that I’m going to hate? I’m growing old with this man. I think that deserves a string of pearls.” Dr. A. Plotnik gets up and shows us the evidence—one moleskine journal.

I look at the journal and then at Madge, whose heart is really going out to Dr. A. Plotnik, and then I look at the journal again. “Plus, how many moles died to make that journal?” I say, hoping to lighten the mood. The two women stare at me. I feel I have no choice but to soldier on with the joke now, hoping it gets funny somehow. “Um, probably about four and a half moles, tops. It’s a small journal.”

The extremely tense silence that descends can only be described as a pall. I’ve never experienced a real pall like this before.

Dr. A. Plotnik lowers the journal and puts it down on the ink blotter on her desk. She picks up a lime green folder and returns to her seat. I glance at Madge, but she won’t make eye contact.

Dr. A. Plotnik says, “Humor. I get it.” She smiles coldly. “Here is your workbook. It’s a weeklong process of daily study. Each session should last one hour. And then each of you will return to your envisionists and reevaluate your future together. If this doesn’t work, you return for another session with me, a more intensive session, and then try again. That will be your last try. Do you understand?”