The Great Perhaps (22 page)

O
N
W
EDNESDAY MORNING, AT THE
M
USEUM OF
N
ATURAL
History, Jonathan confides in the life-sized models of aquatic animals in the World Under the Sea exhibit:

“She’s leaving me. If she hasn’t already, then she probably will anytime now,” he whispers, staring up at the giant humpback whale. “I blew it. I really screwed it up bad this time. And I lost the grant. And the French found a live specimen. And now my life is total shit.” The enormous purple giant squid does not seem moved by the news. Fixed there, in the shadows of the closed exhibit, it does not even seem to be listening. Jonathan sits on the bench and stares up; he is the only moving shadow in a room full of white sheets covering displays that have yet to be finished.

“I am a mess. I really am. I am a fucking mess. I mean, I’m not even supposed to be in here. The museum canceled my research hours. They asked for my fucking key.”

Some minutes later, an odd jingling echoes down the tiled corridor. Jonathan straightens up, trying to comb his greasy hair with his fingers. He looks like hell. The bags beneath his eyes are sunken and black. His blond beard is tangled and uncooperative. He has been wearing the same yellow and red T-shirt for the past three days. Roger, the security guard, ambles down the hall and smiles, taking a seat beside Jonathan on the small wood bench.

“Professor.”

“Roger.”

“Thought I would find you down here.”

“Yep.”

“I heard they asked for your keys.”

“They did.”

“How did you get in this morning?”

“I didn’t give them back.”

Roger nods, scratching his hairy, tattooed neck.

“I think I’m supposed to get those keys from you.”

“Probably.”

“Do you want to give them to me now or do you have to clean your lab out?”

“No. I cleaned it out yesterday.”

Jonathan sighs and reaches into his pants pocket, finding his key ring. He unthreads the museum’s three keys and hands each—one, two, three—to Roger, planting them in his pinkish palm.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Roger says.

“Me, too, Roger. I’d been working on this project for fifteen years now. More than fifteen. Like eighteen. It’s hard to just watch it all turn to shit.”

“What happened anyway? Did you get fired or something?”

“No,” Jonathan says, smiling. “Not yet anyway.”

“Oh.”

“We lost our funding. So…well, we can’t afford to keep our space here.”

“That’s too bad. You were still studying those squids and everything?”

“Yep.”

“What are you going to do now?”

Jonathan leans forward, sighing again. “I don’t know, Roger. I really don’t. You got any suggestions?”

“Nope.” He scratches his neck again, uncomfortable with Jonathan’s gloominess. “Do you want to get high?”

“Okay, Roger,” Jonathan says, almost inaudibly. Roger reaches into the front pocket of his blue uniform, finding a stubby joint. He lights it and takes a long drag and hands it to Jonathan, who stares at the joint for a moment, studying it. A small wisp of smoke rises from the lit end, up and up and up, curling around the innumerable tentacles of the giant squid hanging overhead. Jonathan closes his eyes and takes a long drag, feeling the same cloud quietly surrounding him, the cloud expanding and growing, until he is only just a suggestion, a puff of smoke, a figure of breath himself.

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
,
Jonathan shows up late to his History of Paleontology 101 class and finds the enormous lecture hall mostly empty. There are only about nine or ten students out of a class roster of fifty. He does not despair. He accepts the lousy turnout as another insult in the ongoing depreciation of his life. He smiles to himself in grief, then sets his briefcase behind the beige podium and begins sorting through his notes, hoping to stall. Maybe five or six more kids will show up. But no one comes. Jonathan glances up at the small, bright, clean faces of the students who have bothered to attend his class this afternoon, hoping some of them will seem eager, willing, wanting to learn. But no: they hate him. It is obvious now. The girl with too much makeup on in the front row is filing her nails. A boy wearing an iPod is singing along to himself. A girl in the back of the hall checks the time on her cell phone and yawns again. Jonathan looks over the empty seats and then opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He lowers his head, grabs his briefcase, and then races out.

J
ONATHAN SITS
in the Peugeot in the garage behind his house, staring at the empty spot where his wife’s car ought to be. Jonathan can almost make out the shape of the Volvo station wagon, of where it should be, of what it ought to look like, imagining it as a series of invisible, angular dashes:

Instead there is only a blank space, a background of dull, repetitive concrete bricks, a pattern of chipping mortar, of small cracks, a cobweb triangular and menacing in one corner. There are boxes upon boxes, stacked high atop each other, some ready to fall over. Somewhere within those dilapidated cardboard shapes are all of Madeline’s books from graduate school. There is a box somewhere in that stack that contains her field notes from Ecuador—a six-month research trip to study the social behaviors of migratory birds. There are the goofy letters and flaky love notes that Jonathan wrote to her while she was away, a note folded to look like a heart, another that was supposed to look like a bird. And somewhere within those notes are the words, the feelings, the vanished glow, the panicked urgency, the wonderful, needful alarm, the proof of love, the thing that really matters. If Jonathan had the right kind of oscilloscope, if he had an X-ray machine or a magnifying device, maybe he could discover where he went wrong, where the awkwardness, the factitiousness began, where he started to follow the evolution of a prehistoric species more closely than the three people he should have been observing. Jonathan sighs, staring at the evidence before him. It is one of those incalculable, extraordinary moments when, in adult life, like in the field of paleontology, the physical proof is so undeniably clear. In those dusty, duct-taped boxes, somewhere beneath all this clutter, are the invisible, interred remains of the relationship with his wife. In the blank space where Madeline’s car should be is the overwhelming enormity of what Jonathan has been missing.

I
NSIDE THE EMPTY HOUSE,
it seems that his daughters have also vanished. Jonathan pokes around, calling their names, searching for their book bags sprawled somewhere on the floor, their shoes kicked off in the middle of a room, for some sign, some note, but no, there is nothing. He checks his watch. It’s almost four o’clock. He paces around the house once more, picks up the phone, finds there are no voice messages waiting for him, hangs up the receiver, putters around, then takes a seat in his gray chair in front of the television. Jonathan flips through the channels slowly, then, suddenly remembering, he searches out CNN, leaning forward in his seat, muting the noisy chatter of the blank-looking host, a woman with dark hair and a square jaw. And then he sits there waiting, ignoring the news of the latest conflict in Palestine, of the war in Iraq, of the upcoming presidential elections, he sits there biting his fingernails, uninterested, until finally a purple icon of a squid appears in the small headline box above and to the right of the host’s head:
SEA MONSTER IN CAPTIVITY
, the box reads. Jonathan quickly unmutes the television. It’s not much, really, only a ten-second story: there are a few shots of Dr. Albert and his stupid-looking goatee. There’s one quick shot of what appears to be a giant squid held in an enormous tank, then footage from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. Jonathan squats before the television set and when the program flashes back to the footage of the squid, floating silently in its glass prison, Jonathan places his palm along the screen, trying to cross the impermeable void of static and electrons, to feel the cool glass of the gigantic aquarium against the flat of his hand. And then, just as quickly, the next story is being reported, the woman’s expression unchanging, the headlines behind her a blurry field of text Jonathan does not care to understand. Once again, CNN, with its sound bites and tabloid format, has missed everything. When he has knelt before the TV long enough, when he is sure there will be no more mention of the giant squid for at least another hour, Jonathan stands, calls his wife’s name, and listens to the keen silence. Returning to the kitchen, Jonathan glances out the tiny kitchen window, standing there wishing that he was not so appallingly alone. He watches the sun begin its descent as the final traces of light cause the faintest, farthest clouds in the west to glow.

A. On Wednesday, the cloud-person seems to be lost.
Today Madeline has not gone to work. She has followed the cloud-person all day long. But the cloud does not seem to be following Madeline’s map. Madeline very nearly causes an accident as the Volvo lurches around a slow-moving minivan. The cloud seems to have forgotten the rules. It is zigzagging now, from the lake to Hyde Park, then veering recklessly, the wind carrying it quickly toward the north side of the city. Madeline is frantic, honking her horn, banging on the steering wheel, she does her best to avoid the traffic, but the cloud seems to be drifting north, crossing over the high buildings of the Gold Coast. Madeline tries to watch it and the road at the same time. She glances in the rearview mirror and sees her two suitcases and her travel bag. By now she has packed everything: all of her clothes, shoes, photographs, all of her toiletries, anything she thinks she might need if she finally decides it is time to just leave. The suitcases sit silently in the backseat, waiting. They are waiting like Madeline is waiting, though Madeline suddenly believes she might no longer be waiting for anything. She thinks maybe she has already made her decision. Maybe she is just waiting for the right moment now, for an opportunity, maybe for a chance to say goodbye. Maybe that is it. Maybe she is waiting for someone to notice she has been missing, just so she can say goodbye, and then, and then that will be it. Traffic has stopped moving along Lake Shore Drive, and Madeline, panicked, watches as the cloud continues to hurry off without her. Madeline begins to honk her horn, but the line of cars does not respond. The cloud-figure does not slow down. Madeline murmurs, “Wait…wait…please don’t go…don’t be an asshole…just wait,” then throws open the driver’s-side door and, leaving the Volvo stranded there, parked in rush-hour traffic, she begins to follow on foot. The cloud drifts higher and higher until it is only a faint impression, and then its gone, once and for all.

A
MELIA FINISHES THE BOMB ON
W
EDNESDAY MORNING.
With the Internet’s instruction, she has built an explosive device that runs on a simple timer—the stolen watch, which will, in turn, trigger the explosion of one densely packed length of metal—the toy airplane, filled with the mixture of clipped-off match heads, taken from the professor’s cigarette case, and the black fireworks powder. The bomb is silver and its wires are red and white. It looks amazing. It somehow looks exactly as Amelia had always imagined.

Staring down at it, preparing to place it inside her book bag, Amelia is now too afraid to touch it. The Internet has warned that pipe bombs are the most unstable of explosive devices, that the gunpowder or match heads might suddenly ignite from the slightest, most minuscule amount of friction, and that a number of would-be terrorists are killed every year by unplanned, amateurish explosions. Gently wrapping the device in a small cloth towel and then an old gray sweatshirt, she carefully, slowly, fitfully—holding her breath—places the bomb in her book bag, and then gently zips the zipper up, once more afraid to breathe. She lifts the bag upon her narrow shoulders. The bomb does not go off. It does not destroy the second story of her parents’ house, it does not kill anyone or cause unnecessary collateral damage; the bomb, perfectly assembled by Amelia, does what it’s supposed to at this point, absolutely nothing. Though her heart is throbbing in her thin chest, Amelia is quite pleased with herself. She has gotten through this first, difficult, nerve-wracking phase of the operation without dying. She is not an amateur. The rest of her plan is going to be easy, or so she whispers to herself, staring at the shiny reflection in the mirror before her. With the book bag sagging on her shoulders, Amelia nods once more to herself, and then cautiously places her black beret on her head. She looks exactly right, a missionary with black eyeliner, a revolutionary poster girl—she imagines, years from now, an independent film starring someone like Winona Ryder, but younger, portraying this exact, amazing moment. Saluting her reflection, Amelia then turns from the mirror and marches vigilantly down the stairs.

W
ITH THE PIPE BOMB
resting only a few centimeters from her spine, Amelia decides to skip breakfast. She ditches her sister at the end of the street and walks carefully down the empty tile hallway of her school, trying not to jostle her backpack. At this time on a Wednesday morning the school is almost completely deserted. She stands before the abandoned student newspaper office.
THE MIDWAY
, it says in silver letters along the glass window of the wooden door. Amelia glares at the faded lettering, feeling betrayed even by this, the newspaper’s middling, uninspired title. She finds the office key in her book bag, careful to avoid upsetting the explosive device. She glances down the hallway once more to be sure she isn’t being watched, then unlocks the door and sprints inside, barely breathing.

Inside, the office looks like it always does; it’s a complete mess. Mr. Wick has left the wrappings of yesterday’s lunch on his desk: a crumbled-up, half-eaten cheeseburger from the cafeteria, some molten-looking french fries, and an empty cup of chocolate pudding.
No wonder this newspaper is so useless
, Amelia thinks.
How can it be anything but a reflection of the small, infantile minds who carelessly throw it together?

Amelia glances up at the round clock that hangs above the office’s two computers. 8:49. She has eleven minutes to plant the bomb and hurry to her first-period class. Amelia tenderly slips the book bag off her shoulders, and then, as lightly as she can, she places it on the photo editor’s desk. Black plastic tooth by black plastic tooth, she unzips the bag and then slowly reaches inside. She grasps the bomb’s heavy wrappings and carefully lifts the explosive device out, placing it on the desk before her. She looks up at the clock again and already another minute has gone by. She must plant the device and get out of the office before Mr. Wick shows up at nine o’clock, still half asleep, powdered donuts and giant coffee from Starbucks in his enormous, unwashed hands. She nervously looks up at the clock again. 8:50. Unsteadily, Amelia begins to unwrap the device. One of the lead wires is caught on a stitch of the sweatshirt’s fabric. She begins to panic. Her neck immediately erupts with red welts, her forehead bristling with sweat.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Breathe, breathe
. All she has to do is pull the stitch from the wire without detaching it and setting the explosive off in her hands. 8:52. She breathes deeply, scratches the hives on her neck and left shoulder, then tries to breathe again. She places her hand over her unsteady heart and sighs, then takes one more deep breath, closes her eyes, and lightly tugs on the sweatshirt’s hem. The thread breaks free, the bomb does not explode, and Amelia glances up at the clock once more. 8:54.

Holding the pipe bomb as far from her chest as her slender arms will allow, she hurries over toward the advertising desk, vacant these last two months since Patsy Walker, the advertising editor, quit. Amelia slowly places the pipe bomb in the unlocked top drawer of the black metal filing cabinet, gently setting the timer for 11:00 a.m., when she knows the student newspaper office will be deserted, as that’s when Mr. Wick has to teach his journalism seminar for juniors and seniors, and all the other student editors are busy in their own classes. The timer beeps once, twice, then a third time, and Amelia nervously slides the drawer closed. She finds the key to the filing drawer on her key ring, slips it into the silver-colored lock, and double-checks it to be sure the cabinet cannot be accidentally opened. There. 8:59. She sighs, grabs her book bag, heaves it onto her shoulder, stands behind the office door, glances through the window, which by now reveals a hallway full of sleepy kids, then walks briskly among the unknowing masses, stepping quickly toward her first-period civics class.

A
MELIA IS UNABLE
to concentrate on anything that whole morning: she bites at her nails, scratches the odd blisters on her neck and arms, and keeps glancing up at the clock. It is 10:47. When Mrs. Dennison calls on her in her third-period physics class, Amelia has no idea what the question or the answer might be. From Mrs. Dennison’s expression of disbelief on her rotund, pasty face, Amelia can tell that her teacher is both delighted and disappointed. “I’m surprised, Amelia,” Mrs. Dennison says, now smiling. “I thought you had all the answers.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Dennison,” Amelia says with a false laugh. “I think I’m developing lactose intolerance. I’m having serious medical issues at the moment.”

“Do you want to go down to the health office?”

“No, Mrs. Dennison. I’ll try to persevere.”

Mrs. Dennison smiles and nods, then goes on with her physics problem, something about the law of inverse reaction. Amelia hasn’t taken a single note in her notebook, which lies open to an empty page in the middle of her desk. From the corner of her eye, Amelia glances up at the minute hand once again as it crests toward the top of the hour. She feels like she herself is about to explode. She thinks of Mr. Wick, sitting there dopily behind his desk, eating his powdered donuts, unaware of the danger only a few yards away.
Maybe today is the day he decides to go over the photo layouts. Or the day he accidentally falls asleep. Oh, shit, what if he’s in there napping right now? What if I made a mistake?
Amelia immediately imagines the sound of Mr. Wick’s primitive snores. A swell of panic begins to vibrate through her chest. She tries to jot down the formula Mrs. Dennison has written on the blackboard but the letters and numbers all look completely unfamiliar to her.
What does any of this mean? What does physics have to do with how people live? Isn’t it just another expression of white masculine power, trying to tyrannize the natural world? Just like Mr. Wick. Mr. Wick. Mr. Wick. If the bomb goes off and Mr. Wick dies, accidentally, well, that will be one less spineless white male to repress an entire generation. But what if it’s someone else? Like Max? Or Heather? Or someone you can’t even think of, like a janitor, some poor working-class father with three children to support? What if you accidentally kill an innocent janitor? No. No one’s going to be hurt. Why are you even thinking about this shit right now? Just stay calm. Imagine yourself as a poster, as an actress in the small-budget movie of your life. Be fearless. Try and imagine this moment as being important.

When Amelia has finished copying down the formula, she looks up, watches as the black minute hand slides closer to the numeric 12 at the top of the clock. It is 10:56. Something in her chest is screaming. It can’t possibly be her heart. She is sweating. Her forehead feels slick. She glances from the blackboard to the clock again. It is 10:57. For some reason, she is raising her hand right now. For some reason, she is speaking. She is saying that she needs to go see the nurse. The words, simple, without inflection, tumble from her tongue as she stands and takes the hall pass from Mrs. Dennison’s chubby hand. Already she is running down the hall. She is flying down the tiled stairwell, sliding around the corner, her thin legs moving as quickly as they can, hurtling her small body toward the school newspaper office at the end of the hallway. The clock in the middle of the hall reads 10:59. She lunges for the doorknob. The door to the newspaper office is open. Mr. Wick, his fat face full of white powdered donuts, is sitting behind his desk, reading through a pile of new student stories. He mutters her name in surprise, choking a little on a donut as she dashes toward the subscription desk. She unlocks the filing cabinet drawer without responding. The bomb lies before her, a patchwork of wire and leftovers: matches, a wristwatch, a toy. Without another thought, Amelia pulls the green lead wire, immediately disconnecting the timer. She glances up at the clock. 11:00. The bomb does not explode. The newspaper office is silent, except for the awful chewing of Mr. Wick at his desk. The school bell begins to ring. When it does, its unpleasant drone vibrates along with the shaky tone of Amelia’s heart and she very nearly collapses. As soon as the bell has finished its trebly announcement, Amelia shoves the filing cabinet drawer closed, her knees shaking, her hands shaking, her heartbeat still pounding vainly in her ears. She steadies herself against the subscription desk. Mr. Wick looks up from his papers and asks what it is she’s doing. Amelia turns then, and with as much false confidence as she can muster, she says, “I was looking for my notebook. I guess it must be in my locker.” Mr. Wick nods. Amelia turns the small silver key in the lock then slips it into her pocket. She decides she will have to return after school to get rid of the bomb, as she’s shaking too much to try and do it now. Amelia takes a long, deep breath and, miraculously, she somehow manages to stumble out without fainting.

F
OR THE FULL
five minutes between classes, Amelia stands before her locker, not sure what it is she’s supposed to be doing. She is searching for something, a book maybe, unsure as to what class she’s supposed to be heading to next. The second bell clangs loudly above, announcing her tardiness. She does not hear it. She is staring at the photos she has pasted in her locker, photos of Che, of Fidel, of Marx. Their somber faces all frown with disapproval.
What just happened? Why did I fail? Maybe the newspaper office was a bad idea—of course I’d be suspected. It’s better, in the end, that I backed off. Or is it? Maybe I am only lying to myself right now. Maybe this is exactly what every coward in history has ever thought. No, I’m no Weatherman. I’m no Patty Hearst. I have tried to stage a revolutionary moment and I have completely blown it. I’m a failure. I’m a phony.

Two boys—freshmen, probably—hurry past Amelia, one of them colliding with her left shoulder, knocking the stack of unsorted books from her arm, scattering them all across the hallway. The boy shouts an apology from over his shoulder and keeps on running, while Amelia stops, bends over, and scoops up her belongings from off the dirty tile floor. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she does not curse out loud. Instead, a soft pattering of tears begins to trickle from her eyes. This crying jag is only the latest of her unending, secret failures. Before she trudges off toward her next class, already tardy, she stops and itches her reddened neck. Mr. Hansen, her English teacher, will definitely give her shit for being late again. At the door to the classroom, Amelia distractedly glances down at her nails and sees, along her fingertips, there is blood.

A
FTER HER CLASSES
have ended that Wednesday afternoon, after ditching the bomb in the dumpster near school, Amelia waits in the university faculty parking lot, once again hoping to see Professor Dobbs. She does not care if it is pathetic, her coming up here every day after school to try and find him. Instead, she sits beside his lustrous Saab, thinking up different excuses for running into him. But, of course, he does not show. Maybe he is avoiding her. Maybe that’s why he never gave her a way to get hold of him, no cell phone number, no email, nothing. Maybe he saw something about her, something she can’t see in herself, something predictable, something desperate and incredibly weak. Maybe he carries on with students like this all the time and, in the end, she is only a plaything to him, a piece of soft plastic, a disposable product. But at the moment she is just too depressed to be angry. Still she waits and waits and waits, and when it finally gets dark, when she checks her watch and it reads 6:00 p.m., when she has finished imagining the young professor fucking some undergraduate student—someone just like her but more dynamic, more self-aware—she stands, exasperated, and begins hurrying home. Usually Amelia does not like to walk at night by herself. Most of the time she feels that she is being followed by someone menacing—a maniacal sexual predator or an FBI surveillance team. Amelia often believes she is more important than she actually is, and that secretly, behind every corner, every parked car, every tree, someone, some important observer of history, is almost always watching. But today is very different. Walking home, defeated, her book bag slung low across her back, limping sadly beneath the bare arms of the autumn trees, she does not imagine herself as an image in some future history book or a reenactor in the documentary of her life.