“Why?”
“I haven't got shit going on.”
Was he up to something? I tried to keep my personal life, little that I had, away from Elly. But he was staring at me with wide-open, hopeful eyes, and I was awash with pity. “Fine. We're going to the Natural History Museum.”
“We leaving right now?”
“You're not picking her up with me.”
“Fine. What time?”
“I'll text you.”
“Dude, you know I don't have a phone.”
“Hang out at the entrance and wait for us. I don't care.”
I took a shower, then threw on a wrinkled, blue oxford shirt and a pair of designer jeans that had been nice when I'd bought them five years ago. For shoes, a pair of beaten-up brown loafers. They were the nicest clothes I owned, except for a suit I'd bought right after college. It had been a purchase of faith, a symbolic first step towards a professional career that never materialized. And it no longer fit.
* * *
I made it to the school at 9:56, four minutes before the ceremony began. The double doors were locked, but a tall black woman with thick braids—a nanny for a classmate of Elly's—let me in when saw me banging on the door. She had been using the restroom.
“Lucky for me,” I said. “I'm here to watch my sister graduate.”
We walked down the locker-lined corridor and into the school proper. A two-story pit of a room, it had once been the corporate headquarters of a print magazine, long-since deceased. A half-dozen tables were arranged in the style of a high school cafeteria at the room's center, parallel as open blinds and possessing the bland featurelessness of late 20th century industrial production. Here, the older children engaged in “free-learning,” which meant they completed lessons on their tablets without direct supervision. A balcony ran along three walls, from which descended glass stairways providing an aerial entrance to classrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, where fresh college graduates led lessons for children between the ages of two and eight.
A slightly elevated platform protruded from the fourth wall. The Expert's office was embedded behind it, her desk facing outward toward the room. From her vantage point she could watch the actions of every single student and teacher in the building. She'd taken her inspiration from overbearing managers, replacing suits with polos, and briefcases with brightly colored backpacks.
Today her majesty's throne had been put into service as a makeshift-stage, and the students sat in front of it, pressed into an undifferentiated blob. The Expert stood at a podium, flanked by three assistant teachers. The other adults—mostly nannies, denoted by their varied ages and their black and brown skin—chatted, while a handful of white mothers between thirty-five and fifty huddled at the end of one table. I was the only male of any complexion who was over the age of twelve.
Elly was craning her neck looking for me. When I was half-way down the steps we made eye contact and the uncertainty on her face burst into a smile. She waved. I waved back, and the Expert's gaze flicked disapprovingly in my direction.
I thanked the woman who'd let me in for a second time and sat as close to Elly as I could. The Expert “hem-hemmed” and everyone shut up. She talked about the importance of education at an early age and about how lucky she was to have such wonderful students. I zoned her out. I'd been to Elly's graduation last year and the year before. She'd given the same speech both times, word for word.
The first year the tables had been full and I'd had to stand. The year after I'd squeezed onto the edge of a bench. This year's crop of adults was sparser still, and if the adult audience had been compressed three of the six tables would have sufficed. It may have taken a few years, but the Panic's malaise had risen to the economic tree line, and an elementary school with the tuition of a private university was becoming hard to justify, even in New York. It hadn't been the first thing to go. Through Helen, I knew these parents had given up new cars, vacations, and fancy dinners before paring back the accumulated privileges to which their children were entitled. But with all that and more cut and money still short, the parents had discovered some of the suburb's lost allure their grandparents had gone on about at such length. They certainly weren't sending their children to Manhattan's public schools.
The moms in attendance weren't trophy wives, but hereditary professionals who'd either taken the day off or had lost their jobs and were burning through their retirement savings to send their children here. Those moms—like Helen—whom the Panic had passed over and didn't have an afternoon to spare sent nannies.
When the Expert finished her speech she called out names alphabetically. The students filed across the stage and accepted their certificates while the adults took pictures.
“Elizabeth Felkins.” Elly marched across the stage, a red bow bouncing in her hair. She accepted her certificate. I fumbled with my phone, but by the time I'd activated the camera it was over. Oh well, there'd be plenty more graduations.
The crowd clapped politely after Joseph Zubrinsky sat down. Sixty-one names. Last year there had been over a hundred. The children dispersed to their nannies and adults, and Elly gave me a hug.
“Why hello, fifth circle Elly,” I said.
“Hi Cliff,” she said bashfully.
The Expert walked over to us and congratulated Elly. “You almost missed Elizabeth's graduation.”
“Made it with nary a second to spare.”
“The invitation said parents and guardians were to arrive by 9:45. And I locked the doors myself.”
“I was using the restroom. It was an... uh, emergency.”
“I'm sure. I also noticed you didn't take any pictures while she walked.”
“Yeah...”
“Luckily for her parents, One of my assistants photographs every student. For our records. Talk to her and we'll arrange for Helen and Robert to receive a copy.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“No need for thanks. Some of us have a sense of professional responsibility. At the very least you could make an effort to dress like you do.” Her superiority asserted and need to nag satisfied, she walked over to the mothers and congratulated them in a bubbly, sycophantic voice.
“Let's blow this joint,” Elly said.
“Getting pretty good with that slang, Miss Felkins. But first, your pictures.”
The Expert's assistant teacher and designated photographer was a birchly woman, tall and slim and with skin the hue of resume paper. She was an education major at Barnard, and worked for class credit.
“Hi, excuse me,” I said. “I need a copy of the graduation pictures of Elizabeth Felkins.”
“Of course,” she said. “What's the address?”
I gave it to her. She wrinkled her nose. “Is that a public account?”
I told her it was.
“We don't interface with public mail.”
“But you know I'm not a ghost. I'm right here. In the flesh and blood.”
“I'm sorry, sir. It's against school policy.”
“The same company runs the whole network. It's a meaningless prejudice,” I explained, exasperated. This wasn't the first time I'd run into this issue, and I doubted it would be the last. Well-educated people, who really should know better, immediately assumed you were some deviant spammer if you refused, either from principle or poverty, to spring for a gold-plated mail service.
“A private address really isn't that expensive. It'd be worth it just to save you the hassle.”
I was stumped. If I had the pictures sent to Helen it would be one more byte in an unending string of minor disappointments trumped up by the Expert and Robert into evidence of my incompetence. I could do nothing and Helen might not notice, but I was certain the Expert would follow up. Anything to embarrass me.
“How about... hey can you send them to this address?” I gave her Ruth's.
“Like the reporter?”
“You know her?”
“Everyone's seen Puppies and Politicians.”
“Right. Wel
l, she's my girlfriend.”
“No kidding? Is, ah, Elly Felkins your daughter?”
“What? No.” How old did she think I was? “She's my god daughter. Her mother runs Le Flaneur.”
“Oh! I see. That makes much more sense. I'll send the pictures, but really, it's not hard to set up a private address, sir. I'm sure you could find someone younger to help you.”
“I'll look into it.” Obstacle overcome, I took Elly by the hand. As we climbed the stairs we passed the woman who'd let me in earlier. I gave her a warm smile, which she returned. She was older than me, but not that much older.
We fetched Elly's backpack from her locker. The scattered drizzle from earlier had turned to a downpour and Elly took out a tiny umbrella emblazoned with ladybugs. I'd forgotten my umbrella and had no choice but to soak it up.
I asked if she was hungry. She was, and she wanted pizza. We went to a place nearby and bought three slices.
“Do you know what's on the schedule today, Ells Bells?”
“Zoo?”
“No. Museum.”
“I hate art,” she sulked.
“It's not an art museum. We're going to the Liberty Bell Museum of Natural History.”
Deep-thought. “Hmm.” She was dubious.
“You'll like it, I promise.”
* * *
James wasn't waiting for us when we arrived at the museum, which suited me fine.
A skeletal t-rex dominated the building's entrance hall, it's frozen maw agape and threatening. Elly asked if she could look at it while I bought our tickets. I said she could, if the security guard would let her through.
“It's fine,” he grunted.
She passed through the metal detector and ran over to the tyrannosaurus, straining her neck looking up. Two years ago I'd bought her a dinosaur encyclopedia for her birthday. Each entry contained a paragraph of text and an image that changed with a tap between a rendition of the creature's skeleton and an artist's conception of what it would have looked like alive. The book had triggered a dinosaur phase for Elly, and for a while she wanted to be a paleontologist. Her intensity of interest faded after a year or so, but her obvious glee made it clear that the book had left a permanent mark on her psyche.
The main hall was sparsely populated. Just us, a few straggling retirees, and a grade school class standing single file in front of a cute, ruffled, redhead.
Elly wanted me to take a picture of her standing in front of the skeleton. We pulled out our phones at the same time, and I decided to use hers; it had one of those new Heisenberg cameras, whose manufacturers claimed captured images accurate to the molecular level. I was pretty sure that was bullshit, but the knowledge did little to assuage my resentment over an eight year old owning a phone whose bill exceeded my monthly grocery budget.
I had to back up to the metal detector before the entire skeleton fit in the lens. I gave her a thumbs up and tried to take a picture, but the camera had its own ideas. When it detected my thumb descending towards the screen it began chattering like a gang of chipmunks. The noise continued for several seconds after I tapped the screen, in which time the phone had taken one hundred twenty-eight pictures, analyzed them, and presented me with the two it liked best.
They weren't very good, in my opinion, but Elly liked them. She asked if I could be in charge of taking the pictures as we wandered around.
She wanted to see more dinosaurs, and we took the elevator to the fourth floor. I followed behind as she rushed from one pre-historic exhibit to the next. The phone clicked and chirped of its own volition while the spherical lens lolled in its socket. Elly's voice had activated an automatic picture-taking mode. I put the phone in my pocket for a moment and inspected the results. Fields of blue, the color of my jeans, in all directions. Not so smart after all.
One dinosaur's long neck and tail stretched across the length of the room. Elly read the ancient bronze placard out loud: it was a diplodocus. This specimen measured one-hundred and twenty feet from its snout to the tip of its tail.
She struggled with one of the words. “Herby... herbu...”
“Herbivore. You don't pronounce the 'h.'”
“What's it mean?”
“It means this dinosaur didn't eat any meat, only plants.”
“So it's a nice dinosaur?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you think I can be a herbivore?”
“You'll have to ask your parents. When a person does it they're a vegetarian, not an herbivore.”
“Vegetarian,” she repeated to herself.
She proceeded from dinosaur to dinosaur, reading the descriptions aloud. After finishing each placard she would say, “Isn't that interesting,” or “What a surprising fact.” She was trying to sound like an adult, but unable to conceal her underlying excitement. When I took a turn reading one description, I said her, “Awesome! Isn't that amazing?” and she overcame her inhibition, dragging me from one room to the next as fast as her small gait allowed. She was more interested in reading the information out loud than in the exhibits themselves, giving them a perfunctory glance before moving on to the next. “Isn't that interesting?” was replaced by “Wow!” and “Cooool.”
We moved from the Jurassic to the Pleistocene, traversing a hundred million years with a single step. There were woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, of course, but also a woolly rhinoceros and a five hundred pound armadillo. Each description Elly read ended with the animal's extinction, invariably coinciding with humans muscling into their habitat. Their puny successors, exiled to thin strips of the tropics, had undergone a second wave of extinction not long ago.
When Elly had her fill of the skeletons we checked out the insect wing on the third floor. It was a bust, a victim of entomological layoffs. Most of the exhibits either had broken windows or were darkened and unoccupied but for a sign reading “Coming Soon.” Descriptions for each of the vanished species remained intact.
One corner still had its inhabitants, and we browsed a sparse selection of tarantulas, scorpions, and beetles. Elly quickly lost interest, however, and ran to the end of the wing, where an awkward teenage girl in an outsized lab coat stood behind a table with jars of crawling insects. These piqued Elly's curiosity.
“Hi there. Would you like to hold one of my pets?” the girl in the labcoat asked.
“Yeah!”
The girl stuck her hand into a jar full of fat cockroaches. They fluttered around, their wings clicking against the glass and each other. Gross.
She told Elly to put out her hand, palm-down, then set down the bug. It crawled lazily across her knuckles. “That tickles,” she giggled.
“This cockroach is from Africa. Do you know where that is?” Elly nodded. “You're a smart girl.” The bug skittered up her arm and Elly started to flail. “Don't worry, they don't bite.” The girl plucked it from its perch on Elly's shoulder and set it back in the jar. “Do you want to hold something else?”
“You bet!” she said, undaunted. The girl gave Elly a small branch.
“Do you see the walking stick?” Elly nodded again. I only saw a regular stick. Something on it moved and I hopped back. The girl and Elly both found my reaction hilarious.
“Sir, do you want to hold something? How about this tarantula?” she asked.
“No thanks.”
“He doesn't like bugs, does he?” she said to Elly.
“No. He's a wimp.” They laughed again.
“She's adorable. Are you her father?” Elly was having a riot, and almost dropped the stick, she was laughing so hard.
“What? No! I'm uhhh... her brother. How old do I look?” I wondered out loud.
“I dunno. Thirty?”
“Thirty? I turned twenty-six last month. Thirty? Really? How old are you?”
“I'm not allowed to divulge personal information.”
“Fine. Whatever. Thirty?” I brooded as Elly held the tarantula, then a praying mantis. The girl was visibly uncomfortable, but went on with the volunteer work h
er parents forced her into so she'd be accepted at a good college. I hoped for her sake she was smart and studied something practical, because unless she was an eighteen-year-old ugly duckling her chances at romantic success were slim to none.
When Elly had held each insect she wanted to see the live butterfly exhibit. It was separate from the rest of the museum, and a ticket to enter cost more than general admission. But all of our expenses went straight to the invoice, so what did I care? A swipe of the card and we were in.
The butterflies were housed in a giant glass atrium, the building of which had erupted into a minor political scandal. It had been commissioned by the city in an attempt to buoy development companies in the aftermath of the Panic. They'd hired the architect who designed the Mars Habitat, and his fee alone had consumed the majority of project's budget. But the contracts had been signed, and so the glass bubble was built. After it was completed the city was forced by to sell the entire museum for pennies on the dollar to cover the debt. James claimed it was intentional, that the Mayor's Office and Liberty Bell had been in cahoots from the start.
Inside, I could acknowledge the structure was in no way worth the forfeiture of the museum, but much more had oft been lost for far less. It was a giant glass bubble, but a breathtaking one. Right next to the entrance a mounted display explained how the atrium had been built. Inspired by a snow globe he'd owned as a child, the architect had chosen to use an experimental material called transparent aluminum instead of steel ribs and glass. The end result: an area the size of a football field with a wholly unobstructed view of Independence Park and the Manhattan skyline. The ongoing storm clouded the further reaches of the city, but to the north I could see the abandoned skeletons of half-finished skyscrapers dotting Harlem like the dead ships of vanquished alien invaders.
The atrium was lit by street lamps. Elly and I strolled through the dimly lit garden, exposed to yet free from the weather. Overhead, the rain pounded against the dome before tracing its curves down to glass gutters while the butterflies floated around us, oblivious to the artifice of their environment. A light blue one with black spots landed in Elly's hair, resting undisturbed as she pointed out which butterflies she liked best. We were alone in here, tiny creatures in our own exhibit.
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