“What’s your question?” Rebecca said.
“Why isn’t the sky green?”
“Well, I—”
“Because okay look. Plants are green. The energy that makes plants grow comes from the sun. And that energy has to go through the sky to get to the plants. So if plants are green, why isn’t the sky green, too?”
“I’ve got this one,” Philip said, making a show of cracking his knuckles. At these times, rarer than Rebecca would have liked, a light came back into her husband’s eyes that reminded her of when they’d first started dating: once again he was the magpie, flitting among a hundred different subjects, reveling in the pleasure of knowing solely for the sake of knowing.
“So this question is actually a two-parter,” Philip began. “Actually, you could break it down into a huge number of smaller parts, but let’s call it two. First: why are most plants green? That’s because of the pigment chlorophyll, which absorbs the energy from sunlight. Specifically, chlorophyll absorbs light from the blue and red bands of the visible spectrum and converts that light to energy, but it reflects the green light to your eyes. Which raises the question: Why didn’t plants evolve to be black instead of green? Wouldn’t they grow more quickly if they chose to absorb green light instead of reflecting it? Not to anthropomorphize plants by suggesting that they choose their energy sources, like a diner at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it’s an interesting question. Digressive, though.”
“Uh…huh,” said Sean. He was stroking his chin with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture that Rebecca suspected he had picked up from television: she had noticed that he did it when he was the only child in the company of adults, and wanted to give the impression that he was following the conversation.
“Now, second half,” Philip continued. “Why is the sky blue, and not green. And you’ll notice that though it’s not always blue—it shifts toward red as the sun descends to the horizon—it’s never green! This is because of Rayleigh scattering, which is—”
“The sky isn’t green because it would look ugly,” Rebecca said.
Sean gave his mother a suspicious side-eye: this appeared to be another gesture he’d picked up from TV, or videos on the Internet.
“Think about it,” said Rebecca. “You go out to a field on a bright spring day. There’s green grass beneath you and a blue sky above you. Maybe throw a cloud or two in there. It’s beautiful, right? But imagine what the world would look like if the sky were the color of pea soup. People would never want to go outside because their eyes would get bored. But a blue sky is really nice to look at.”
Sean continued to stroke his chin, looking upward. “That is a very good answer,” he said at last, and Rebecca beamed.
Later that evening, when Philip slipped into bed next to Rebecca and spoke the command to shut off the lamp on the nightstand, he said, “I want to talk about Sean’s question.”
“Oh, do you?” Rebecca turned over to face him. “Still feeling the sting of defeat, are you? It’s okay—”
“But all you did was feed him a just-so story! If he’s going to grow up to be a scientist, it’s best for him to get into the habit of rational thinking as early as possible—”
“Okay. Okay. First of all, your answer, whenever you got around to finishing it, would have been great for someone who already knew why the sky was blue, because then they could just agree with how thorough your response was. But Sean is seven. What does a seven-year-old know about Rayleigh scattering, whatever that is?”
“I was going to explain that in terms a child could understand—”
Rebecca placed an extended index finger on Philip’s lips. “Shh. Second. I don’t know where you got the idea that Sean is going to turn out to be a scientist, because it’s clear to anyone with two eyes that our son has the blood of an artist in his veins: he’s going to become a great painter, or a filmmaker, or something. Remember that picture he drew of you for Father’s Day? You can already see him working on the techniques that will later come to define his middle-period style. And my answer to his question, the best answer, was intended to gently ease him into the basics of color theory, which he’ll find quite useful in the decades to come.”
“Dear,” Philip said, “at the end of the day, your answer just wasn’t true. Wait—that’s not right. It wasn’t…I don’t know what it was.”
“Honey,” Rebecca said, slipping her arms around him, “it was true enough.”
16
SPIVEY’S LAMENT
Terence.
Hey Terence!
We haven’t even been here ten minutes and you’ve already got your head buried in that book. I suppose you expect me to sit here at this desk for however many hours, staring at the ceiling and not saying anything until I go crazy or something. Put that book down and help me bullshit!
I got something for you: I got something I want to throw at you. You might not believe this, but I have figured out how time travel works.
Oh, now you’re putting the book down. Now I’ve got your attention.
You’re thinking: how could a security guard who hasn’t seen the inside of a school in who knows how long sit here and solve a question that has continued to stump the minds of the double-degreed geniuses walking in and out of here every day? But I’ve been thinking, way outside the box. I don’t even know where the box is: if you want to find it, ask some people who don’t know how time travel works, and maybe they can tell you.
Listen.
I got the idea when I went down to visit my sister Rita. The doctors finally took her leg off, by the way—I go over there to keep her spirits up. She was sitting on the couch, watching this time travel movie. It was about the time of the civil rights movement: you know, there are these black maids scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets and white women not even noticing they exist, except when they want something from them. You know: Rochester smiles in the mirror as he puts on his tuxedo ’cause he’s proud to be a butler for that rich family with a house at the top of the hill, but then a car comes by and splashes mud on him in the street. The kind of movie you watch so you can get good and pissed off and talk to the screen, you know? And that’s just what Rita was doing. “Oh, if that white woman talked to me like that it’d be her first and last time. I’d snatch that apron off and slap her like she’d lost God’s love. I’d say: You come over here and sit still a second so I can slap the taste out of your mouth.” She was good and mad! See why it’s a time travel movie? The time machine isn’t in the movie, on the screen: it’s in your head. You watch a movie like that and you get to imagine yourself going back in time so you can trash-talk a bunch of dumbasses. You look at what happened between the time of that movie and now; you think about all those people who put their asses on the line ramming equal rights down America’s throat, day after day, ’til it had no choice but to swallow or choke. All so Rita can sit in her air-conditioned house, in the future, safe as could be, telling off a bunch of ghosts, acting out some stuff that happened before she was even born. It was the history between then and now that made it easy for her to sit on her couch and say that. For the maid, back then: not so easy. Do you hear me?
So this is the thing about time travel that means that anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense would stay away from it. Because if you went back in time, the history that made you what you are would not have happened yet. And you would revert. You would become someone else.
You like science fiction, Terence: it’s time for some science fiction. Let’s imagine there’s a scientist, an anthropologist or what have you, and he’s got a time machine. And he wants to go back to the dawn of man to look around. He gets in the time machine, pulls a bunch of levers, and gets out again at about three million years BC. Then he turns around and, shit. Where’d the time machine go? It was here just a minute ago! Thing is, the history that made a time machine possible hasn’t happened yet, so how can there be a time machine there? This guy turns around and where he expected to see a time machine, there’s j
ust a pile of metal. He’s in trouble now.
By the way, you would think that if, in the future, people ever made time machines, we would know about it, because they would have come back in time to visit us, right? This is why we’ve never seen them: because going back in time is a one-way trip. You get out of the time machine, and then it turns into a pile of rocks, or a covered wagon, or a washer-dryer combo, and that’s your ass. And no one is going to believe you if you point at, like, a stove, and say it used to be a time machine up until about a minute ago.
So this guy, this scientist, he’s stuck in three million BC and he figures he may as well make the best of it. He doesn’t have any paper—he had a notebook in his pocket, but it turned into a hunk of wood—but maybe he can find a way to chisel some messages into some stones so his buddies can pick them up in the future, three-million-odd years later. He goes around watching these apes do what they do, and after a couple of days he notices he’s got a little more hair on his knuckles than he used to, and after a couple more days he notices he’s not as quick a thinker as he used to be, and after a couple more days he reaches up to feel his head and he finds out his skull is changing shape. Then he realizes. The history that made apes into humans hasn’t happened yet. He is turning into an ape.
It takes a couple of weeks. At first he’s scared shitless, and he gets really desperate, and he even takes that pile of metal chunks and halfway thinks about trying to build a time machine out of it. But he never knew exactly how the thing worked in the first place, just like you don’t really know how a phone or a computer works: you just follow the instructions and use it.
And he’s getting dumber every day: he’s going backward. Then he just says Hell with it and gives up and joins the apes, and they take him in as one of their own. There are nights when he’s in a cave with about fifty other apes, huddled there with his ape girlfriend to stay warm, and when he goes to sleep he has dreams about what it used to be like to be human: these dreams where he’s using a socket wrench, or putting on a rubber, or looking something up on Google. But when he wakes up the dreams don’t make any sense to him, and after a while he doesn’t have them anymore. He’s just an ape now, like all the other apes.
This is why anyone with common sense would stay the hell away from time travel! Because history makes you what you are. And if you traveled back in time you wouldn’t get to be you anymore. You would have a different history, and you would become someone else. Do you really want to become someone else?
Going back to that movie. We live in the future now. And white people will look at that movie and trash-talk it just like Rita. Oh, goodness, it’s just so self-evidently wrong how those people treated their domestics. It shows an absolute lack of empathy. Why, I’m completely appalled. You know. But put a white woman in a time machine, and hell, throw a black woman in there with her too. They go back to the South in the 1960s, they get out of the time machine, they turn around and see it’s turned into an AMC Rambler with a busted transmission. You give them a while to live there in the past, day after day, without that constant reassurance from other people that it’s safe and okay to think the way they do. Nine out of ten white people would go from thinking the idea of equal rights for everybody was as obvious as the nose on your face to saying, Well, goodness, we’d be perfectly happy to make at least a few concessions to the Negroes if they’d just stop making so much noise! I’ve got one more for you that’s worse: nine out of ten black people would drop to their knees without even a peep, scrubbing toilets and proud to be Rochester. These people marching around with signs and trying to get served in restaurants are gonna get sprayed with fire hoses and jumped on by dogs—God bless ’em, but I ain’t getting mixed up in that.
Isn’t that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn’t know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it’s bigger than any one man. It takes a lot of people working together for years to change things even a little! And you’re gonna make the world different all by yourself, you and no one else, because you think you know a little something. You must be joking.
You might be able to change history a little. A tiny little bit. But if you went back in time I know one thing for certain: history would damn sure change you.
Do you hear me?
Do you feel me?
17
SAFETY FOAM
Later, when the time came to assign the blame, Rebecca’s father would tell her something he believed but was too afraid to say in the pulpit: that the true enemy of humanity was not Evil, an abstract idea personified by some sort of crimson-faced creature dancing in flames, but Chance, that smoky million-handed monster forever fitting its tiny fingers into the fissures of your life, working to tear it apart, loosening the fatal screw, turning that first cell cancerous, sending lightning to strike the tree that you chose for shelter from the storm. The version of Satan that embodied every ill of human life had been patched onto the Judeo-Christian tradition because the early God that Moses knew was too tough and terrible for worshippers to want to deal with. The fear that Moses had of Yahweh was as much of His caprice as of His power—He was just as likely to force the Hebrews to wander in the wilderness as He was to rescue them from the Egyptians. In short, He was not the embodiment of good, but of chance: neither good nor evil, but inscrutable and unavoidable.
Seen this way, Woody believed, the relentless catalog of God’s commands that makes up much of the early books of the Bible seems less arbitrary: the actions of humans that are most likely to “please God” are also those that allow humans to act collectively to mitigate the negative effects of chance on individual lives. It is why there is such an emphasis in the Torah on attempting to return lost things to their original owners instead of keeping them for yourself, or why the greatest of sins is failure to offer hospitality to a random stranger in distress. If God created humans with the ability to dictate the direction of history (by imagining future states of the universe and steering its path toward one version or another), then humanity’s duty to God was to direct history toward the best of all possible worlds.
Once Satan was invented, though, once it became possible for humans to convince themselves that they might be able to cleanly separate good from evil, the idea was lost that those actions that are morally good are also those that allow humans to remain vigilant against chance. And when something grievous happened to us that we could never have seen coming, our first and worst impulse was to try to discover what unknown person had done the clear evil that started the chain of events that led to our tragedy, or to wonder whether that person was, inadvertently, ourselves.
“What I’m saying,” Woody said as he, Marianne, and Rebecca sat on a couch together, his daughter laying her head on her mother’s lap and sobbing so hard that pain shot down the center of her chest, “is that what happened yesterday isn’t the result of you being evil. It was greatly unfortunate. And I dearly wish that it had never happened. But to say that it was evil: that is to simplify a complex matter, and to take a burden upon yourself that you cannot bear if, in the long, distant future, you are to have any chance of happiness.
“As callous as this might seem, Rebecca: you have to grieve, and understand, and make it a part of you. And then you have to stop asking questions: you have to let it go.”
What led to the tragedy was this:
Rebecca got a call on her cell at three o’clock in the afternoon, smack in the middle of her private time, the time during which she had the quiet drink or two that would let her deal with being in her own head for the rest of the day. She would have let it go to voicemail, but it was Sean’s school. Probably last-minute permission needed for a forgotten field trip, or some other overly cautious pedantry meant to cater to helicopter parents. She answered: the ice in her second gin and tonic (okay, third today) was already starting to melt.
“Rebecca Steiner?”
“Rebecca Wright.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know
you weren’t married.”
“I am married.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”
“This conversation isn’t going well. Let’s begin again. Who are you?”
“I’m Mrs. Baldridge: I’m here at Stratton Elementary. I need to let you know that your son was…in an altercation during the lunch period today. And we’re keeping him after school, as a measure of discipline.”
Well, I hope you’re springing for a cab, Rebecca thought but didn’t say.
“No, we’re most certainly not ‘springing for a cab.’ You, or your partner, will have to come here to pick him up, or make some other arrangements.”
Oops. But also: so fucking angry right now. Not at Sean, but at this woman. Keeping him after class to inconvenience the mother, too: punish her for her bad parenting. She had to be getting her jollies off this: she’d go home tonight to her empty apartment and her nightly frozen dinner, and while she dug into a microwaved chicken pot pie with a chunk of ice still in the middle she’d think about how, oooh, she kept a kid after school, oooh oh God yes she made his mother come to pick him up.
“What time should I be there, Mrs. Baldridge?”
“Four thirty will be perfectly fine, after an hour’s detention.” It will be perfectly fine for you to drive out here during rush hour.
“That’s fine. I’ll see you then.”
So, two and a half hours—plenty of time to enjoy this drink in peace, and maybe knock back one more to fortify herself so she could deal with Mrs. Baldridge without biting out her throat. They’d just bought a second car, this one autonomous, and Philip had taken the old manual car to work that day. The new car was a better driver than Rebecca could ever be, even when stone sober, and the cops never pulled over cars with green plates because, why would you? And Rebecca was super skilled at looking straight when she was schnockered: she always had been. Lately she’d been lit like a Christmas tree in front of teetotaler Philip almost every time she saw him, and he hadn’t said a word.
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