by Greg Hrbek
A whisper: “Karim …”
“Mm.”
“What are you thinking?”
Turning now to Yassim and wanting to answer him but unable to tell the truth and unable to lie—and so saying nothing, though if he were to speak truly (and in words that would express his thoughts truly), he would say: I am thinking of pulling the cord. Which I almost already did, back in that place, and I would have—but for the baby; and now, despite having nearly done it an hour ago and there being now and here no baby to harm, I can’t seem to do it, Yassim. Because right now there is still time. Air to breathe; things to see; a friend to sit beside for a while longer. The less time left to me, the more precious to me the rapidly diminishing time that remains. So that with every passing moment (which is another moment subtracted from the remainder), it seems harder to do what I know I should—
“Karim …”
“Mm.”
“We’re here, habibi.”
And yet, try to understand me, Yassim: To cling to this remainder of time—which is no more than a scrap of paper burning—at the expense of the futures we would destroy, the lives we would sadden, is to renounce something even more valuable than breath, sight, companionship … Picking up his backpack, opening the door, going to the front passenger window which his mother is opening while reaching across the seat and taking Yassim’s right hand in his left; a gesture not rejected, but augmented by a firmness of grip that feels to Karim like a response to everything he would have said, a holding of the hand meant to mean: Yes, I do understand: of course: now. His mother reaching out, touching his cheek on a new morning. His friend holding his hand at the end of days. And he almost tearful at the separation. Thinking: Maybe I’m scared about next week, flying across the ocean alone—well, it’s too late now because everything has been arranged. Though it is not too late. Despite all the arrangements of the men in the front. Pull the cord now and all their arrangements shall come apart on a deserted and darkened city block. It will seem, as you place her broken eyeglasses in your lap, that you can feel her hand on your cheek as it is touching his; and as you reach for the cord on the vest he will be shaking off the weird squall of emotions because it isn’t too late because he hasn’t left yet. She says: “See you soon, Karim.” And despite your wavering faith, you can’t help but believe her: envisioning her—as you close your eyes and pull the cord—in a place where a fountain streams skyward pure white water, and all is shrouded in a mist faintly falling, a rainbow in the mist made of sun and water, the colors of which are the true colors of light.
EPILOGUE
Later that night, in the Province of New York—on the pathway which, until this time, has been our focus—a boy named Dorian Wakefield will succumb to the early symptoms of a weaponized strain of hemorrhagic fever which will take his life by the following day (as it has already taken his mother’s) … But on another path, at a parallel point on the grid, a boy named Dorian Wakefield will be in his home above the Russian River Valley in California, at the dinner table: brother next to him; parents directly across; sister at the head. All five of them holding their phones—they all have the photo up, the one Kathryn e-mailed them yesterday from the beach—and laughing together.
“It’s not just the glasses on Mom,” Cliff is saying. “It’s that thing on Dad’s—under his lip.”
“It was called a soul patch,” Mitch says.
“Ha! Oh, and the two of you think you’re so cool—”
“We do not,” Kathryn says.
“Yeah, you think you’re such hipsters. And then look at me, your son and heir, fat as a blimp.”
“You’re not fat.”
“I’m like a baby that got delivered in a Denny’s in West Virginia.”
“That’s offensive,” Kathryn says.
“It is,” Mitch says. “But it’s true. He was a goddamn embarrassment.”
And Dorian laughing, too, though he feels weirdly left out, having not been envisaged much less born at the time his sister transformed his parents and brother via imaging software into a jigsaw puzzle of pixels which, at a certain degree of magnification, shows them exactly as they were one day on Goat Rock Beach in what must have been 2020 or 2021.
“I just don’t remember this at all,” Skyler says. “Are you sure I took it?”
“You must’ve,” Mitch says.
Kathryn (pouring wine): “Sky, I remember, specifically. You dug this hole in front of us …”
And his mother repeating herself now, which she tends to do when she’s drinking and happy. Happy because everyone is home: Skyler staying the weekend, in the bedroom that hasn’t undergone a change since she moved out completely five years ago at the age of twenty-one. Evening meal long over. Everyone drunk but him (even Cliff, who has downed his one special-occasion glass of wine and negotiated a second); and Dorian feeling tempted to sneak away and smoke a green, but knowing if he does they’ll know he did it and they really will be angry (his parents, that is), and he will have done damage to what in a way has been a perfect night.
“Doesn’t matter who took it,” Cliff says. “The point is, the two of you think you’re so cool …”
And Dorian does leave the table, though not to do anything delinquent. Just going outside. Where the sun went down some time ago. Making now just the faintest light over the western horizon: as when, in a crystal ball, future images spark and swirl. And he thinking, like the glow from a crystal ball. And wondering if his sister, the aspiring fictionist, would appreciate that simile, maybe even use it in the book she’s working on at school. If she were out here with me, I’d tell it to her. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Because for some time now, a few months, maybe more than a few, he has been feeling … How? He can’t say. Can’t pin the emotion down with any adjective. Except: Different. Different than he always has. As if something is changing (has changed already) and the old (or only) ways of feeling about and acting toward his sister are broken links: words and gestures pointing toward a relationship that has become forever unavailable.
The door slides open.
It’s Skyler. Coming out of the house, onto the patio; and closing the door behind her, muffling again the laughter and the shouting, though Dorian can still hear it as he watches her fall onto a lounge chair.
“Our brother is sauced,” she says.
“I know.”
“I have to admit, I’m a little tipsy. Mom is completely trashed. Dad. Dad I think has a bionic liver. I hope you’re looking forward to your future as an alcoholic.”
“I guess I am.”
“So,” she says, “when are you leaving?”
“For camp?”
“Mm.”
“Next Thursday.”
(On her back, looking up at the sky): “You nervous?”
“Nah.”
“No? So, what is it then? What’s up with you?”
Silence while night seems suddenly to crest over them: a wave of darkness flotsammed with stars. And Dorian thinking of the night Skyler called him, a few weeks ago, late, to ask the same question (though her tone that night had not been casual), and he had told her there was nothing wrong, which is to say he answered her untruthfully; and remembering how, when his ringtone sounded, he had been dreaming, standing on the lawn of a house that was theirs but wasn’t, with a car wrecked against a tree and the driver dead by gunshot. Her phone call shocked him out of the illusion, though he then had the feeling, for just a moment or two, that he had only traded one dream for another. In another instant: fully awake—and, in a way, lying to her (to whom he never lies, cannot lie), saying I am in no trouble, when in fact he’d been troubled for months, struggling to understand why everything seemed to be coming apart when everything was perfectly fine and still is now and yet even on a perfect night like this—my family together and happy and I am even alone with my sister under the stars—it seeming to him that something is being lost.
He finally says: “I dunno.”
“Dodo.”
“I’m s
erious, Sky. I can’t explain it.”
Something moves out by the eucalyptus trees, a swift passing of hooves or paws (deer or fox); then nothing again.
“Maybe you’re in love with someone,” she says.
“I doubt it.”
“Maybe you’re in denial about being in love with someone.”
“Are you?” he says.
“What. In love?” Still supine. Staring up at what some see as Heaven: “I think so. Yes.”
And Dorian thinking of the boy (strange to say: man) whom he has met more than once. Doesn’t like him, doesn’t dislike him. He who just is. Who might as well be a principle of physics.
“Things aren’t like they used to be,” she says. “Are they?”
“No.”
“I feel it, too. I have this dream sometimes, I don’t even know if I should tell you.”
“What.”
She sits up and sits on the edge of the chair. “Something happens in the city. An explosion, a meteor or a bomb. It hits the bridge and whole neighborhoods are burning, and you’re really hurt, except you’re not really you. You belong to someone else and—I can’t really save you. I can’t even stay with you.”
“Sky,” he says. “WTF.”
“I know, but my point is, that would never really happen. Same with you and me. We’ll never grow apart. No matter how much things change. We’re just afraid we might. That’s all it is. It’s just fear.”
And he thinking later (too late to still be awake and thinking, but he can’t stop his thoughts): She’s right. It’s the same way people have always felt. Since the days we lived in caves and feared the violence of nature and then dreamed up the idea of gods and feared their anger and then joined together in groups and came to fear each other. Yet even after the passing (no, the slaying, as of dragons) of those primal superstitions and prejudices—despite the agreements, accords, and treaties of the New Enlightenment—a fear is still in us: haunting ghost of a time when we said it was already too late, the ice caps are melting, the oil is running out, the civilizations are clashing … (Falling asleep now, though still thinking, and the thoughts being bent by the curvature of sleep): But we saved everything, we saved it all in the clouds {{examples}} all our memories and dreams and that’s where we live now {{where}} in the cloud {{disambiguation needed}} …
The next week, despite everything she said and the good sense it made to you, getting on a jet plane to fly across the continent will feel like embarkation on a spaceflight to another galaxy, during which trip you will sleep and dream for a century, to realize, upon awakening, that everything you once knew—everything you were—is dead and gone. Calm down. This is just how it feels. Say to yourself—after making it through the security check, putting your shoes and belt back on, slipping your backpack over your shoulder—as you stand blinking at the departures on the monitor, looking for DETROIT PAN A.M. 343, say: It’s fear, that’s all. And keep thinking, as you make your way to the gate: Just a fear of what might happen. Because you will take off from San Francisco and land in Detroit as safe as can be—and you’ll make your connection in plenty of time, video-calling and texting and posting photos all along the way, aware of how lonely it would’ve been, once upon a time, to make a trip like this by yourself and have no real connectivity to anyone you’d left behind, no more contact than an analog phone call in a booth, a few minutes with only a voice: to your mind, the saddest form of communication. At the airport in Albany, by the luggage carousel, there will be someone waiting with a placard. DORIAN WAKEFIELD. The person holding it, a man (about the age of your sister’s boyfriend, but with long hair held back by a bandanna), gives you a smile a moment before you even move toward him, and says (reaching out in a handshake that is more than a welcome; it’s like an assurance that you’ve arrived at a place destined for you):
“You Dorian?”
The drive to the camp is two hours. This guy in the bandanna, it turns out, is the counselor in charge of your cabin, which houses twelve campers for the two-week session: four boys from each of the major religious backgrounds (three from overseas: Israel, Switzerland, and the Islamic Republic of Palestine). “If I remember correctly,” he says, “you’re a not-practicing Christian.” Which leads into a conversation about your belief (or lack thereof) in God, and from there to a series of topics, including: organized religion, family, weather in Upstate New York, Major League Baseball, and the space-time continuum. Before you know it, you are in the mountain range, the peaks—those liftings of ancient rock (which had first appeared as blue ghosts in the far distance)—high around you now, green and bouldered, and the road curling through the gaps and saddles, no intersecting routes, only unpaved turn-offs into the forest, one of which will be the one that climbs about five hundred feet through the lowland conifers to a lake carved by a glacier, blue sky copy-merged onto the surface of the water, and a sign arching over the dirt road:
CAMP DAKOTA
So, now here you are—in a place where you will raft and rock climb, hike into the backcountry and pitch tents, build a fire and listen to the wolves (who, once endangered, thrive again in these mountains) howling from deeper in the wilderness; and, more than all this, where you will come to know children who share your ideals, with whom you will coexist and cooperate for a time, and later stay connected to via social media, creating a kind of intelligence able to span oceans and continents. The van stops in a pool of evergreen shadow, under crashing waves of insect sound.
“Loud, ain’t it?”
“Cicadas.”
He nods and leads you up the steps of the main lodge. “The Great Eastern Brood of 2038.”
After you have checked in and made your last call home and surrendered your phone, proceed to a little settlement of log cabins with the names of native peoples written above the doorways: Cherokee, Cayuga, Oneida. Inside the one named Poospatuck is where you will find him …
“Excuse me.”
A boy so absorbed in reading, he didn’t even notice your approach. But he sets the book down now and looks at you through eyes with brows slanted like accent marks, and says: “Are you my bunkmate?”
“I think so. This is three, right?”
“Three, yeah.” Sliding down from the top. “My name is Karim.”
“Dorian.”
“You cool with the bottom? We can switch if you want.”
“No, I’m good.”
While you unpack your duffel—clothes for a week, toiletries, a journal and a pen, a paper book, which he picks up and leafs through (A Swiftly Tilting Planet)—he explains that fire circle is in an hour and you’ll meet everyone else and tell them where you’re from and vice versa, though there isn’t any prohibition (he claims) against revealing the information ahead of time, so you say California and he says Geneva. Well, I’m not from Switzerland. I was born in America. He has an older sister. Me, too. Here, I brought real pictures. Isn’t it kind of cool, to hold them like this. And so on. The two of you finding it strangely and surprisingly easy to talk to one another, as it can be easy to talk once again to a friend from a long time ago, despite having gone down different paths.
•
Nature, like time, is a constant. Which is to say that, at every (x = 0) coordinate on the grid—in the geographical region defined on many pathways (though by no means a majority) as the Northeastern United States—the Great Eastern Brood of 2038, also known as Brood X, also known as magicicada septendecim, is nearing the end of its lifecycle. The females, with knife-like ovipositors, have scored the bark of thick branches and laid their eggs in the slits, from which will come, two weeks hence, the nymphs. Born into a world without adults, without mothers or fathers (who by then will be dead), and perhaps this is why the children fall from the trees by the millions and burrow underground and don’t emerge for seventeen years: What they’re doing down there is mourning. As millions of people across the infinitude of the grid shall always be mourning, coping with every imaginable variation of loss. Every loss deserves a t
elling. What we have presented here is a fraction of a whole, no more representative of the total narrative than a single cell is representative of the living body of a person, just as every person described herein is, in like manner, a fraction of a greater whole of selves. And yet, even this limited picture provides us with a working equation describing the relationship between widely separated coordinates and their interconnectivity, including possible trans-path causalities. It has been posited that, in the near future (c. x = 500), an algorithm will be devised, complex enough to generate a full report of all diversifications: in other words, that infinity itself will be captured in its entirety. For the time being, this imperfect story of one family’s experience will have to suffice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the following people and organizations: Dede Hill, Melora Wolff, and Linda Simon, for generous help with many drafts; everyone at Melville House, in particular Taylor Sperry (editor), Dennis Johnson (publisher), and Adly Elewa (artist); the Steering Committee of the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, and everyone associated with the Château de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence; and Kathryn Davis, whose fiction showed me a better way forward and whose faith in this book was essential to its completion.