The Mere Future (2 page)
Do you grasp the moment? Two knowing lovers with a chance for more in a better world. What a place to start a futuristic story. Looking to the future means there will be one, which is a sign of great hope. And so, optimistically, we go forth.
Dark skies mellowed, shook, and died. Now, pools of dried butter in crispy whole wheat, we departed into the former rain and she went along with kisses on the sidewalk. Although no longer illegal, still crusted with the frisson of potential humiliation by others. Two well-dressed women in love in the splurge of middle age.
The lighting was so demure, naturally gray and smoky. We have had better lives, after all, than we would have being straight, but only together. Alone is the fall. Into their mercy. And they don’t have any. The others. Nadine, it’s our mercy or none.
I have a collection of memories, too numerous to list, or even to hold conceptually, too onerous to miss, mutinous too.
Brandy in snifters, like actors drink in the magazines Nadine works for. Actors. They’re everywhere. Especially on the advertising pages my dear one produces with electronic/digital/solar/oceanic systems that seventeen individuals used to be paid to do. Only some of those folks have found new jobs. Others are now too rich to work, and the rest? I forget.
Our shared knowledge has brought me through every scary moment.
We’ve each pleased more women than any United Nations agency. After all, only the crazy can resist shutting their eyes and getting fucked, despite the lost loves gone poison, intentionally. I don’t believe in breakups. If you look and listen, every loving moment can be praised.
Hey you? Still here? Yoo-hoo.
Give me your body with full confidence. I’ll know what to do. Then, very proper, a nice kiss goodbye. Once again we did each other a favor.
The street is always gorgeous afternoons after making love. I’ve known that feeling since I was seventeen years old. You can’t remember it, just recapture it.
When Nadine comes home tonight, I’ll be lying between the sheets waiting for her to melt the ice in the lock.
Manhattan wasn’t always this way.
I
HAVE ALWAYS
believed in precision. That it is, in fact, the centerpiece of truth. The continually vague are continually lying. Try to pin them down and they’ll slash out like wolves.
Like most of this era’s cerebral women, I work as a copywriter. Boiling it all down to a few words. This job is about reducing experience to bite-sized morsels, which is generally dehumanizing and yet requires humanity. You have to notice the truth in order to be able to avoid it. In the olden times I would have been a great corporate secretary, bringing a woman’s touch to a big bad machine. Now they don’t have secretaries anymore, just vice-presidents. These are the saddest men I have ever seen.
I’ve been at this job for the rest of my life. At some point long after my adolescence, every company that could survive merged into one … with distinct divisions … so downsizing … while never-ending … no longer seemed to be happening. It was economic mitosis, an undetectable action of the natural world requiring a microscope to observe. We were blinded by the fun of all having the same boss,
THE MEDIA HUB
, while our units provided Identity. Everyone knows what their friends are going through when there is only one field. Empathy becomes easier to muster.
When I finished my Postdoctoral Studies in Placemats of the Moyen Age, I took my place at
THE MEDIA HUB
. It was waiting for me. On my first day of work in this branch, so long ago, I went to the corner and took a sauna. In those times, before things were slightly better, even waitresses needed to be able to translate from the French in order to get a job. Everything was so competitive then, even being exploited was hard to get. All women had to be overqualified to earn a basic check.
In that particular sauna were two old ladies, Eastern European accents, recent émigrés. This was decades ago now, before Bulgarians became the world’s street people. The new white underclass. Currently, Albanian junkies hook on every corner of the western world. And Japan. But this was before their fall from Pseudo-Socialism.
I looked at my ancient naked colleagues and saw that one, talking about her grandson’s bar mitzvah, had a number on her arm. Just like my old granny’s cousin, who I met for two hours in an airport café. The tattoo on my cousin, Dora, began with the same letter as the tattoo on the flabby arm of this naked woman in the tub. The letter A. For Auschwitz. Dora had been a slave laborer there, working in a munitions factory. After the war, she was dumped from the Displaced Persons’ camp to Israel, where the authorities considered it work experience and gave her a job in a munitions factory.
“My cousin was in the same camp,” I said conversationally, reclining against the jacuzzi’s caress. “Auschwitz.”
“I was in Auschwitz,” she said. “But how did you know?”
“The letter A,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean Auschwitz. It means
Arbeiter
. Worker. I was a slave.”
“My cousin too,” I congenially assured.
“Then she should get her money. They’re paying now, for the work. I got a check from Volkswagen.”
Her name was Frieda Berger. She had come from Romania ten years before. She was nice, friendly. Sad that my cousin had recently died. And later I thought—
this is the importance of precise
detail
.
You see, I could have gone through my entire life from my soft seat of comfort believing that A=Auschwitz, that prisoners were identified by their locale. And all my life I would have been wrong, and somewhat deluded, thinking that geography mattered, when actually these people were identified by function. Not knowing this information would have made me miss the whole thing. How dehumanization actually works. And in my armchair of generalized thinking, this other person’s life would have remained so fuzzy that its reality would have been unknowable to me, while I thought I knew it all. I wanted to change history in order to make me feel safer, and the lack of precision would have let me do it.
I report this to you with hindsight.
Now, as my own city is changing within me, every moment filled with telling detail, I know that I have to really pay attention. Now I live in the midst of a huge social transformation, and those can always go either way. Sometimes, come the Revolution, we all eat strawberries and cream. Sometimes, come the Revolution, we only eat strawberries and cream. What if you don’t like strawberries and cream? Sometimes, come the Revolution, we
have
to eat strawberries and cream.
Nadine and I watched our new beloved Mayor, Sophinisba Breckinridge, rise to power. And then we watched the changes that followed. Until, one day, the changes actually affected us. This was that day.
This very revolutionary strawberry and cream morning, I received a notice beckoning me to a meeting with one of America’s most powerful cultural arbiters: Harrison Bond.
“Mister Harrison Bond requests a personal audience with you, as a consequence of the great social change that is currently underway.”
I had been chosen, suddenly, somehow, to have the opportunity to meet with him and taste the schlag. Wow.
That’s the new system
, I thought with the grandiosity of recognition.
The new system is working for me.
I, a lowly copywriter with great secret dreams, had been selected by the New Order for individual attention. This was true Democracy, finally. Anyone can get inside the system now. It’s all random, as it should be.
You see, it had finally been acknowledged that there was no relationship between merit and reward. That while on occasion people doing truly meaningful acts were given presents, it wasn’t because they deserved them. It was a coincidence. They got the presents because their fathers went to some college, or they had sex with an ugly casting director, or they made the person in power feel good about their own mediocrity—some coincidence like that. At the same time, it seems that the vast majority of truly valuable gestures—the kinds that expand understanding and create hope— were excluded from recognition. So, since those with experience, praise, and stature were found to have no merit, and the truly deserving were so alienated they couldn’t invest in any system, the only fair solution was to just open the floodgates and let everyone in. Hopefully, it would all sort itself out.
Once the standards had changed, the doorways to opportunity were suddenly filled with feet. My big dawgs included. It was a grand chance, but I had to keep track of all the details in case I blew it. Then, at least, I would have a true story. To tell Nadine. And we could muse, dissect, and laugh. Regardless of the outcome, right? That’s love, isn’t it?—having someone willing to share the disappointment.
At The Opium Restaurant on Avenue F, the moon recalled those of June and other months with transitional weather. It passed, hovered, came too close, and then recoiled. The citizens found this confusing: the seduction followed by withholding. But then, they each remembered the last woman they loved, and the moon’s ride suddenly felt familiar.
Movement, unpredictability, seasonal containment, and public transformation without public transportation. A lunar borderline personality disorder. The shifting sky assured the existence of fate, divine order, external consequences while waiting endlessly for the broken-down bus.
At the corner bus stop with no bus in sight, the doomed waiters glanced into The Opium out of boredom and hunger. But they had to be in another world, awaiting their ride. Later, perhaps, one of them could grab a stand-up hummus at Mamoun’s Falafel. But those not on the go, the most jejune of our clan, sit here and demurely lunch as I wait for the tall, quasi-presentable man.
A spreading cloud darkens the restaurant’s front yard and then dazzles it. When the shade finally passes, only the shadow of my now-arrived companion looms brightly over the table. Mister Bond. Young man, not so young, whose fate has been sealed by his own physicality. This meal, a symbolic truce between two worlds, The Mediocre and The Small, was mandated by the sudden, shocking social advances of only one year before. It all stemmed from Sophinisba’s new decree, the
Dissolving the Pretension That
Has Come to Define Literature Act.
It was the nine-hundredth campaign promise that she’d actually kept.
My co-eater, Harrison Bond, had been an important figure in the dominant paradigm due to his persistently relative youth and persuasive lack of life experience. He practiced a kind of literature called “Modern Situations.” Each story involved a couple, a prosperous but banal location, and breezy journalistic sentences. The couple would have glib, ironic experiences. It was a conceit that diminished life, his power. But, in this pause between hope and ancient distrust, I poured us the wine.
Chateau du Lait
. It’s the post-raw years now, when this pour took place. Wine comes from Nebraska. Those abandoned crystal meth labs turned out to be good for something. Smoked mozzarella is made in Detroit in former automotive plants. Ford mozzarella or Chevrolet. The poor are still poor while the working class smokes mozzarella for their daily bread.
As I watched Mister Bond silently chew, I began to reflect on the miracle of our changing collective life. Now, by the luck of the mighty pendulum, one less person goes hungry under our cherished new system because I hand over my lunch to a passing collection truck every other Thursday. We took a vote in Manhattan, each man, woman, and child. Would we rather that people go hungry OR would we each give up lunch once every fifteen days? We voted to share. And for that same reason, so that I can get my reasonable due, this tall fellow has to endure a lower stature than he always expected to enjoy. This new system was devised by a German Jew (Sophinisba’s mother’s maiden name was Rosenbaum).
Life is only a shiver. The light through neighboring Coke bottles is a lonely sign of impure sensibility. Everything else on our plates is natural and home-grown. We can sit out in front and eat peacefully now that the homeless are no longer banging through our garbage cans. They’re busy eating my lunch.
We waste in peace.
Ah, social tranquility. Thanks to Sophinisba and her Retrocrat Party, things are a little more hopeful than they once were. So no dirty claws lift old rice from garbage cans to their own cracked lips. No rotten scraps interrupt our lovely meal. No resentment from faces other than our own. No one else’s hunger.
N
ADINE AND
I both voted for Sophinisba. The other choices were: Milando Spenokovich on the Catholic Resumption Party, Jena Chelsea Gore III on the Celebutante with Education Party, Boo-Boo on the Party Party, and Eileen Myles on the Seniors for Seniority Party. Sophinisba won us over with her slogan:
“Conceptualize Beyond Your Task”
It swayed us.
Usually, Nadine voted for the liberal guy, and I voted for any black person who was not conflicted about abortion rights. I figured that they would be the most reliable. And they were. But they never won. Yet we united politically around Sophinisba Breckinridge, who made us feel both safe and invigorated. She was a former social worker from the days when there used to be social services. That was quaint and endearing. She had never been beautiful, also reassuring. She had big, intelligent ideas, persuasive in their precision. And then, it happened. We went to sleep, and when we woke up, she was the mayor.
Surprisingly, Sophinisba started to do everything that she had said she would do. This was unbelievable and difficult to grasp. All New Yorkers walked around stunned. Eyes opened, backs straight, flabbergasted. More people could fit into the subway because we were all so erect. And after the first week, the whole world started to notice. When you change New York, the universe burps. Someone had kept their word.
I try to keep my word.
If I say, “I’ll have that for you by Wednesday at three o’clock,” then I’ll have it for you by Wednesday at three o’clock. What always defeats me is when people promise Wednesday but really mean a year from April. Can’t they just say so in the first place? Should I second-guess that they’re lying, or just believe people and get hurt? The answer? Believe! I have to. I couldn’t live another day if I didn’t think that you would keep your word. Once said, it must be done. Life falls apart when we waste our precious dream time trying to diagnose in order to avoid being misled.
