The Mere Future (8 page)

“Look,” my father said, young and robust, large key ring dangling by his side. He had always wanted to be great, the world’s best Super. But he did not hold his thwarted wish against others who truly were great, nor those who had failed but tried. This generosity came, in part, from the fact that no one on earth was considered the World’s Best Superintendent. He aspired to a goal that no one else could attain either.

“He used to be the ruler of Russia.”

I stared, transfixed. This is what happens to kings, stars, the most powerful of men. They can be reduced to standing next to me. “Look,” my father whispered. “Look at him now. He can’t even chew.”

What a lesson. So many years later, I carry this warning from my dear old dad. Nothing matters except Nadine.

As an adult, I avoided mass-produced edible treats, and only bought organics that were tasty and overpriced. Now, though, at People’s Market, there was unlimited choice. Not just fifty-seven kinds of cheese, but 157. And each was named after its maker: Steve Cheese, Joanne Cheese, Ludwig Cheese, Jr.

And standing there, in front of the acres of personal cheese, I had my own adult paternal memorial Slavic celebrity sighting. Anna Kornslyovichkowaskyski. In her day, she had been the darling of the Party. The grandsons of the overthrowers of Kerenski had made her a star. She could have tea in her coffee while the People just got educated. Now, though, with the former Soviet Union in subdivisions that would make Long Island jealous, she lived in New York buying potatoes right out of the earth. Here at People’s Market, you dig them yourself.

“Hi,” I said. “If I had a child of my own, I would have him shake your hand.”

“You know me?” She smiled.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for the shake. “You were the most privileged and corrupt movie star in all of the CCCP.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling for the cameras. “That will always be true. Even when I am dead. Film curators with fetishes for kitsch will dig up my films and feel some pang of desire. No matter what they know intellectually, they will never lose that little
ooooohhhh
one feels in the presence of a star.”

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“I work in
THE MEDIA HUB
.” She looked tragic. It was lovely. She had found resilience, and then triumph of the human spirit.

“Thank you,” I said. “Your performance reminds me of what really matters in life. It is healing and transformative.”

I was thinking about Nadine, and a smile came to my tongue.

“You’re welcome,” she answered, burdened by the history of Mother Russia and ten pounds of laundry detergent. “The mighty must fall, and yet, they once were mighty.” And then she wheeled down the aisle towards the condiments.

I stopped, surrounded by red kale, purple sage, lemon chard, radish greens. All of these should make up Nadine’s bed. Let her lie on a throw of sweet, clean, leafy vegetables. A blanket of nutrients. I admired her. And secretly, in that store, I worshipped her.

Treat your lover like Lord Krishna, unless she thinks she’s Lord Krishna.

I shopped with love. I carried my groceries home with purpose. I cooked them with delight and served them with desire. Every mundane action was carried out with love. I realized that I had the human anchor. I did not need the glory of Harrison Bond, and I did not need the price of kowtowing to his cowlick. I had something better. Something real. I had Nadine to love. And so I resolved to stay at my boring job, stay at my maintenance income, stay at my level of achievement, and swell in my love for Nadine. Who I knew was not thinking of me at all, because she too is real, and serves her own purpose.

I went outside and stood, staring up at my gorgeous new city. Thank you Sophinisba, for letting me in just enough to see that I don’t need the glitz. Wow, she was a genius. Taking the obstacles down gave us more free choice in our lives. Removing the poison of glamor made my life singularly better. Who needed Bond? Not I.

And in the moment I was filled with my love for Nadine, her enormous wish, the pleasure of my life. I was filled with joy.

12. A WORKING GIRL FROM
THE WORKING CLASS

O
F THE TWO
women who Harrison loved, only one—Claire Sanchez—was a working girl from the Bronx.

Like other blue-collar women in the age of empty and compulsive overqualification, she had a Master’s Degree in Techno-Scription and one in Visual Cues. All day long she designed pages for Ad-Month, Ad-Week, Ad-Day, and Ad-Minute.

Everyday she designed cyberpages that were not real pages for stores that were not real stores. And they all belonged to each other, merged and managed by sinister mysterious and imprecise forces.

There was no material plane.

But Claire increasingly noticed, with some surprise, when she walked down the street, that under the new regime every store was different. Yet when she went to work, all the cyberpages remained the same.

This was very odd.

Since
THE CHANGE
, two entirely different cultures seemed to be co-inciting. One was outside, on the street—where each store, sign, design, outfit, motif, and moment were different. The other was inside, online—where it all remained the same.

When walking lazily on a Sunday afternoon, on the way to and from Competitive Yoga class, Claire could pop in and out of all kinds of eccentric experiences, make singular purchases. The birds chirped, the wind blew, the rain scattered, and everything around her was individual.

But as soon as she stepped inside her apartment or office and turned on the computer, it was all mass-produced and homogenized. On the pink and blue sidewalks, next to those logo-free buildings, she would never think about buying a brand name. But when she turned on the machine, her mind changed. Suddenly Consistency and Familiarity were the most comforting of all.

This was the compromise that Sophinisba had struck between Business and Humanity.

Walking down streets that all had the same stores had proven to be depressing. More and more New Yorkers were complaining of repetition compulsion. The reason that they lived in NYC was to see something new every block. Without that, they felt trapped. With branches of the same bank next to the same fast-food coffee shop on Seventh Street, Eighth Street, Ninth Street, and Tenth, people were getting sadder, and could no longer have crazy, wild great ideas and then carry them out. They already felt defeated by the time they got to work in the morning. The city had become boring. Which made them deranged.

Before
THE CHANGE
, New Yorkers were becoming increasingly confused. They could not remember where they were. Differentiation therapists were thriving, but everyone else was schizophrenic. With the removal of all that sameness, the only conformity was through computer screens and mail. Even alienation had become depersonalized.

Claire had seen that bad stuff unfold and knew that things were a lot more hopeful now. And yet, she felt an uneasy sense of balance. There was a different city outside her door than behind it. Her computers were all inside, although they claimed to be access to the out. Yet nothing outside resembled the world found on her screens, the world within. Claire noticed this regularly and it made her itch.

She was feeling similarly about Harrison—itchy. And getting nowhere with Jeff.

I go through men like telephone poles
, she thought.

This thought was some kind of slogan. An ad for her own consciousness. But what did it mean besides a penile allusion? Most ads had sexual innuendo but no meaning, and now her feelings did too. Did people go through telephone poles? It was the other way around, like Frida Kahlo. Or did she mean telephone
polls
, where they ask you a question to try to make you buy? Even devoid of meaning, the phrase sounded reasonable. It sounded provocative, sexual, dangerous, wise, and glib. It sounded ironic and know-it-all, but it actually meant nothing. It was a facsimile of an idea.
This is
what happens,
Claire noted with objective horror,
to people who
live advertising, i.e., all people
. They had thoughts that sounded meaningful, but weren’t. Minds were changing, getting smaller. Including hers.

Maybe it was all subconsciously because of Harrison’s title about his sperm, or maybe his sperm was just another reflection of the preexisting trend. Excitement about using references to men’s genitals had overtaken the country. Everyone metaphored someone else’s cock. It was like saying “okay” or “whatever.” A habit.

Claire’s ex-best friend, Ginette, whom she now demonized, had once told her:

“You need to be fucked by a tree.”

This could be interpreted as prophetic, since they were now both taking turns sitting on the engorged penis of the same very tall Harrison Bond. But also, Ginette had not intended that statement as an erotic prediction, but rather meant to imply she thought that Claire was a major cunt. It was a put-down. Something about a woman’s vagina being large around meant something demeaning about her character and soul.

Now, remembering that bitch Ginette, Claire had a new take on the meaning of her thought,
I go through men like telephone poles.

She and Ginette had once driven down a country road decorated by former trees that were now working for the phone company. This was when they were friends and were on their way to have Christmas with Ginette’s parents in an exotic part of West Virginia. They kept passing the poles, passing the poles, which all looked just the same. That’s what Claire felt about men. They were wildly different individuals, but her feelings of doom were interchangeable. While memories of Ginette remained uniquely painful.

Whew! Relief!

She had realized something about herself that wasn’t about a product.

There was still some content to her interior life. Where would that lead? She had to choose between Harrison, who was himself choosing, and Jeff, who ignored her completely.

How to decide?

Harrison Bond was a big old brute. Of that, Claire was sure. He always hinted at a desire to fuck her in the ass, not softly and carefully, as they had done a couple of times already. But rather, with a lot more force. He wanted to tear her insides to shreds.

“I want to tear your insides to shreds,” he’d panted.

Fortunately, his penis was just too big for that much action, so she had plenty of reason to deflect his rectal rage.

He cried a lot, that Harrison. He was so sad. Sometimes when Claire was dreaming about her true love, Jeff, she would happen to have a psychic glance at Harrison and see his despair. His big secret was that he could not feel cool about himself, and he told her so. Many times. It was fun, that kind of intimacy. They both loved every second of it. The had each, in the past, yearned for this and thrown it away. Now they both had the same chance for redemption. Claire would rub Harrison’s belly and he would confess his self-loathing. Trying, trying to reach out and connect. He did not know that she secretly loved Jeff. He’d never heard of Jeff. He thought that this distance between him and Claire was natural, and it made him feel safe. He had no idea that she was really dreaming of another man.

In these moments Harrison assessed, mistakenly, that he could probably find another woman any time he wanted to, but that if Claire ever got sick of his weird ways, she would probably be alone.

Sometimes Claire was so upset about Jeff that she tore out her eyebrows. The last time she did this they did not grow back, and she had to get permanent makeup tattooed over her eyes. Harrison never noticed.

Jeff is a kook, true,
she thought lovingly.
But maybe, just maybe,
he will help me learn something about myself that would equal the
kind of peace I felt when he’d rubbed my back.

Every single boyfriend she’d ever had, had come to a time when he no longer wanted to rub her back. He was too tired. It was the sign. Of doom.

Claire had a terrible fear of uselessness, that all the labors of her life would come to nothing. All that loving, come to nothing. There was a great ambiguity at the center of Claire’s existence that had followed her all of her days.

Help! Help!

“Fate!” she cried, waiting for the mail. “Please make all my decisions for me.”

13. FATHER HOOD

A
ND WHO WAS
this guy, Jeff? The Withholder, with so many fates in his unwilling hands? Jeff lived on the Fourthside of town and had two sons: Dominick and Freddy.

Dominick was in rehab. Freddy was in detox. That’s the kind of father Jeff was.

Frankly, Jeff had never done a thing to help his kids. Every sentence he’d ever muttered to either of them had started with the word YOU and was then followed by a delineation of how bad they were, or how wrong.

“You, nobody wants you here.”

“You, you’re wrong, kid. You’re a wrong kid.”

That sort of thing.

Of course, there were reasons for this. As Sigmund Freud noted, families have cultures like countries, and patterns of pain are reproduced from generation to generation. Obviously, Jeff’s own father had also been inadequate, and it was a good bet that that guy’s dad was in the same boat. Etcetera.

Nonetheless, we live in the moment, and the handing down of pain defines Jeff’s fatherhood.

The way that Mayor Sophinisba Breckinridge’s policies affected Jeff’s damaged life was that, in the past, he would have been financially responsible for trying to fix the kids. Since he was inept, he never would have had the money, and Dominick and Freddy would have been detritus in the sea of life. But now, with the new Mediserve System, Jeff was not the only person who had to cough up the cash for the consequences of his earlier inactions. Others would chip in. So Dominick and Freddy actually got the treatment they needed and, therefore (under the new system), deserved. Simply by having been born.

That’s why Jeff was such a wreck at the time Claire fell in love with him. Not only was he his old bad self, but he also suffered from lack of penance in the face of all the pain he had caused.

Ah, the unforeseen nature of forgiveness without amends, it gives the transgressor nothing to wish for.