Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  Micah peered out the window, New Jersey passing by in a Turnpike blur of tollbooths and scrolled iron bridges and all-night refinery flames burning sacredly in the low distance near smokestack ruins and the enormous, mantis-like gantries of the industrial ports, her reflection superimposed upon all this, her eyes sometimes watching her eyes as the hours slid by and New Jersey turned briefly into Delaware and then became Maryland, and dawn fuzzed the horizon. Soon they’d be home, Micah and the girl. She could almost smell it approaching, beckoning her onward: the caramel scent of freshly split pignut hickory, the wintry char-smell of woodsmoke haze, and out in the woods the springtime onion-odor of wild leeks giving way to summer’s grape-soda perfume of mountain laurel along with the musty, vibrant, fern-rot funk of the stream bank, beside the water’s distilled silver chill, where as a little girl she’d lured a trusting fawn within six feet of her, a record her father called unchallenged in the history of mankind. She watched her reflection dissipating in the blooming sunlight. What John Rye had done wrong, Micah would do right. And what John Rye had done right, she would do better. This was all the remaking of the world she could do, for now. The tiny sleeping girl in her arms, she thought, could dream the rest.

  7

  THE CALL CAME TO Elwin after he’d just unburdened himself of the very last of his Craigslist offerings: the remaining venison in his deep-freeze. He’d posted the ad as a lark, a tongue-in-cheek farewell to his Craigslist odyssey, never for a moment expecting a response. “Ten-month-old roadkilled venison, frozen. About 20 lbs. left, predominantly roasts. Competently butchered (I hit it myself), packaged, and sealed. Have eaten plenty of it myself, with no ill effects, but it’s not on the new diet and frankly I’m tired of it. Free to first taker. Serious inquiries only. (Ha!)” Within four hours he’d received a dozen inquiries, at least half of them serious or at least convincingly deadpan. The first claimants turned out to be a pair of unsmiling brothers from Morristown by way of Honduras, and they came to pick it up on a Monday evening, saying little as they mined the meat from the bottom of the deep-freeze and dumped the brown, frost-gilded parcels into recycled plastic ShopRite bags. Elwin shook his head in droll bewilderment as he watched them drive away, then immediately called Christopher.

  Christopher had his own place now, an efficiency apartment in a complex over by the mall. The apartment was within theoretical walking distance of the AutoZone where after just three weeks Christopher had been promoted from customer-service rep to parts sales manager. The store manager liked Christopher parking the Jeep out front, instead of behind the store where the other employees parked, on the grounds that the Jeep was good advertising. A girlfriend was also said to be in the picture, though Elwin hadn’t met her. Kelly at the bar said she was “nice enough,” dropping her voice a notch, however, when noting she didn’t take her gum out when she drank beer. This struck Elwin as an entirely forgivable flaw, and from Kelly’s wounded tone he surmised, improbably, that Kelly had something of a crush on Christopher. Stranger things had happened.

  “You’ll never believe this,” Elwin said to him. “Someone took the deer meat.”

  “You really posted that? I thought you were shittin me.”

  “I did,” Elwin said, and pricked by Christopher’s incredulity he added, “I mean, there wasn’t anything wrong with it . . .”

  “Punk, Doc. Super punk.” An interjecting series of beeps from Elwin’s phone clipped off the rest: “That’s—whole new—punk.”

  “Hold on, Chris, there’s another call coming in. Okay?”

  Happily, confidently, Christopher said, “I got nowhere to go.”

  On Elwin’s other line was the director of the Roth Residence. Elwin’s father was dead. “He went peacefully, during a nap,” the director said. The voice was consoling but robotic, the inflections corroded by over-routine. “We think his heart just stopped.”

  Elwin said, “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “There’s no rush . . .” the director said.

  En route to the city he called his sister Jane, whose audible tears came as a surprise to him. He didn’t think he’d heard her cry since the time she’d come in third, despite being heavily favored to win, in the five-hundred-yard freestyle at the Greater Essex Conference Championship; his impression, from having observed her through two divorces, financial semi-ruin, and the death of their mother, was that she’d given up competitive swimming and crying on the very same day. He certainly didn’t expect this particular loss to break that streak, considering the peculiar grudge she’d been holding against their father for all these years, but there she was, honking exotic sobs into the phone, then briefly collecting herself before smithereening into sobs all over again. His call reached her in St. Lucia, where she was vacationing with husband number three, the anesthesiologist, and for some reason—perhaps the strange imbalance he felt on the line, with Jane reduced to tears by precisely the same loss dry-eyed Elwin was suffering—he apologized to her for ruining her vacation. “Oh El,” she said warmly, “don’t be such an ass.” Jane volunteered to tell their brother David, wondering aloud if the number she had for him in China would actually ring all the way over there. “Well, it’s supposed to,” Elwin said carefully, chalking up the ditziness to her unfamiliar emotional state. This led them into a reminiscence about the time as children they’d tried digging to China through the backyard, all three of them, unearthing a hole deep enough to swallow David whole, and how in discouraging their expedition their mother had cited the earth’s volcanic core while their father had urged them ever downward. Elwin remembered it oppositely—their mother had been the lover of digging, their father the lover of fact—and this, coupled with the warbly timbre of Jane’s voice, suggested to Elwin that it might be cocktail hour in St. Lucia. He reconsidered Jane’s tears in light of this, though not uncharitably, his only conclusion being that Jane would always be a mystery to him, as perhaps he was to her.

  Next he called Sharon, and reaching her voicemail instead he found himself stammering, because calling her in the first place was a bit odd, and to leave her a message about his father’s death odder still. So instead he claimed to be calling about the Waste Markers project, which was a less-than-sturdy lie since their work on that was all but complete, their report on its way to a government printing office. Two months after the flirty languor of the shore trip, their chumminess—he was beginning to loathe this word but had yet to find a replacement candidate—had developed a pressurized edge, awaiting one or the other to address it. The poor but persistent analogy that came to Elwin’s mind was a Saran Wrap–covered bowl of leftovers heating in a microwave, with the plastic ballooning dangerously from steam; if you didn’t vent the Saran Wrap, you got a messy microwave. The closest they’d come to venting it, he supposed, was while drinking away the aftershocks of the Markers panel’s most rancorous day, when Sharon grasped Elwin’s hand across the table in a gesture of sympathy for the point he was making. The touch had stalled them both, because it felt so powerfully conjugal, almost fated, and they’d let out synchronized sighs while gaping dumbly at their enjoined hands. “We’re such old goobers,” Sharon finally said. “Let’s just let what happens happen, right?”

  This had come at the end of a rough three days, when the panel met in San Francisco to draft its final recommendations. Elwin had stayed to the side of the debates on what they called physical messaging—how to use architecture to scare future generations away from the sixteen-square-mile radioactive site. One doomed but popular idea was to construct a “landscape of thorns”: sixty-foot concrete spires jutting from the desert at randomly jagged angles, with sharply tapered branches, to evoke a 240-acre briar patch. Cost projections, however, killed that one, along with the odds-making of how a proposal like that would fare in Congress—even its fiercest proponents could envision the concrete thorns showing up in negative campaign ads, the perfect visual for wasteful government boondoggles. The consensus idea was to propose massive earthen berms, like river levee
s, surrounding an assortment of twenty-five-foot granite monoliths which the materials scientist Carrollton assured them wouldn’t be as cryptically Stonehenge-ish as they sounded. Engraved upon those monoliths would be a varying series of warning messages, which was where Elwin—and the rancor—had come in.

  Byron Torrance’s side was lobbying for a strong language component, language being in their estimation the most unambiguous form of communication. You could blame Elwin’s thirty-plus years of studying language death for his resistance (as the Torrancians did), but Elwin found this position almost criminally naive. Of the seven languages they proposed for engraving the warning message, one (Navajo) was already endangered, and the others—Arabic, English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French, the six primary languages of the United Nations—were, by his projections, unlikely to survive another five hundred years in anything close to their current states. His counter-proposal: a warning message based upon pictograms, which he’d sketched out for the panel (cartoon figures fleeing the site in horror, corpses, mayhem, a version of Munch’s The Scream that Sharon unhelpfully noted had a closer resemblance to the kid from the “Home Alone” movies). He’d gone so far as to fish out from the surviving boxes in his basement his childhood cache of “Henry” comic books, and passing them out to the panelists he stressed how comprehensible and entertaining they were, despite their absence of words, or language of any kind. Einstein, Elwin reminded them, didn’t think in words or numerals—rather in images, which he then translated into words. And the oldest enduring communications, he noted, were Paleolithic-era cave paintings, which when you got down to it weren’t so very different from “Henry.”

  “But knowing what a cave painting depicts isn’t the same as understanding the message it’s conveying,” Torrance shot back. “That’s the real trick. Infinite clarity. Take a stick figure holding a spear, painted beside a bear. What’s the message? Lots of bears here, good eating? Or instead: Watch out, hungry bears here, make sure you’re armed? Or maybe no message.” He nodded toward Sharon, as if to joggle her well-known alliance with Elwin. “Art for art’s sake. The painter working out a dream he’d had about killing a bear. Understanding what it is doesn’t mean we understand what it says. Especially when you factor in all the elements we can’t decipher—the handprints at the Chauvet caves, good example.”

  “Interpretation of imagery can be ambiguous,” Elwin granted. “But if conveyed in a dead script, there isn’t any interpretation.”

  Torrance wagged his head, sliding away the issue of “Henry” unopened before him. “We can’t base deep-time communication on a comic book.”

  “And we also can’t send the equivalent of the Voynich Manuscript into deep time,” Elwin blurted back. A low mumble circled the table, and Sharon leaned in with an inquisitively raised finger. “A fifteenth-century codex,” Elwin explained. “Written in an unknown language that no one has ever been able to decipher. Not even World War II codebreakers. Definitely not linguists.” Shooting a dark glance toward Torrance, he added, “A lot of scholars suspect it’s a hoax. Which I’d call our worst-worst-case scenario.”

  Torrance twirled a pencil through his fingers, impatiently flexing his jaw. “So it comes down to your sense of futility versus ours,” he said, but before Elwin could respond the panel’s legal expert (surely a middle child) chimed, “I’d call that a good argument for redundancy.” Torrance disagreed, however, and so did the others. There would be minimal images: primarily the trefoil radiation symbol, which struck Elwin as as useless an image as the biohazard symbol in his father’s bathroom at the nursing home. It was like attempting to communicate with a newly discovered Amazonian tribe via naval signal flags. The panel also voted to add translations of the warning in several more Native American languages as a compensatory gesture for secreting a quarter-million barrels of toxic waste beneath sacred tribal grounds. Elwin might have just as well stayed home.

  “You’re really wadded up about all this, aren’t you?” Sharon said later, at the bar of their Mason Street hotel.

  “Am I?” Elwin said. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. It’s just the arrogance of it. This idea that there will always be more. That civilization won’t ever stop growing, won’t ever emerge from puberty. That the arc of human history has to swing upward—”

  “It’s a preliminary report on a proposal,” Sharon cut in, flexing her jaw with impatience the same way Torrance had. “For a project that won’t be implemented until 2030 at the earliest, and probably won’t be implemented at all if the Republicans have their say in it.”

  “But—”

  “For a waste dump, El. For a garbage dump.”

  Absorbing this like a slow poison, he said weakly, “For the only epitaph we’re likely to leave on this goddamn planet.”

  She stared at him in a peculiar, head-tilted way, as if noting something new about him, an unplayed B-side. “This isn’t your epitaph, El,” she said, and that’s when her hand came down onto his, with the weight of not merely affection but some heavier, warmer element, too. Fate, love, mercy: one of the dense nouns, the ones into which we stuff all the mysteries of existence. With a strange palpable swiftness Elwin felt the future narrowing, the deep-time horizon shrinking back so that all he could spy of the future was its foreground: the next hour, or maybe the next week or month or year, or perhaps, if he squinted out toward the furthest point, the one, two, three decades remaining in the life of Elwin Cross Jr. But nothing more. “Let’s just let what happens happen, right?” he heard Sharon saying, and he latched onto a liberating tone in that otherwise empty-sounding notion, the dissonant bliss of surrender: let it be, like the song said. Because what was going to happen, would happen. Languages would die, despite Elwin’s efforts at triage. His father would die. He himself would die. Civilization as we understood it would die. And had he gotten his way, in five or ten thousand years someone—human, cyborg, extraterrestrial—might have come upon his granite comic book of horror and wondered, perhaps, why anyone would’ve thought it mattered, why anyone might’ve cared. We came, we saw, we trashed. One futility versus another.

  And now, Monday evening, the on-ramp to I-78 looming just past the next red light: Now it was happening. His father had died. The expectedness of this event—moving a parent into a nursing home is nothing if not an act of anticipation—somehow didn’t blunt the sorrow of it. Loose tears didn’t flow, as they had for Jane, but instead there came to him a tightening sense of gloom, of a finality that can’t be felt in advance, no matter the forecast, no matter the certitude. Out of bridge-and-tunnel instinct he dialed in the traffic report on the radio in his new car—he’d bought a brand-new Ford hybrid, despite Christopher’s bilingual objection that it lacked “cojones”—but flicked it off just as fast, realizing that the traffic didn’t really matter. His route was his route. Plus, as the director said, there wasn’t any rush. Slowness, in fact, felt like a virtue. This would be his last drive down to Henry Street, and he almost wanted to savor it—not because it was enjoyable but because the drive had become a component of his relationship with his father, an act of devotion that doubled as a means of assuaging his guilt for having interred his father in that human junkyard, in that scrap heap of obsolete ancestors. He watched the familiar sights sliding by—the merkin of suburban leafiness giving way to the obscure and dilapidated factories on the outskirts of Newark, the salt domes, the billboards he’d read a thousand times, the heat-wobbled air above the smokestacks, Manhattan appearing as a serrated grayness on the horizon—as his car was funneled into all that teeming metal hurtling eastward on I-78 and then the Pulaski Skyway, the toxic green swirls of the Meadowlands roiling far below him. When Sharon called him back he told her about his father, and she told him to be strong. “I’m there with you, El,” she said, and he drew solace from the idea: that amidst all these thousands of people gliding beside him, someone was with him, even invisibly, even merely as a sympathetic cliché.

  At the Roth Residence, Boolah led Elwin into
his father’s room. “I’m real sorry,” Boolah said, with a genuineness that had eluded his boss. “I’m gonna miss your dad. He was a real pain in the ass. You just holler if you need anything.”

  Elwin sat down on the edge of the bed, inhaling the same scents his father had awakened to every day: the wafting antiseptic sourness, the fake-floral reek of prescription moisturizing creams, soiled undergarments fermenting in big blue plastic bins. He wanted to think of his father as he had been before all this, out of filial loyalty, but it was impossible. Broken by the Alzheimer’s disease into the before and the after, they were like two different people, related but separate. The before-father he’d already lost, at least partly; this loss, of the after-father, felt like a physical disappearance trailing years behind the dwindling of his essence, as though the mind had finally claimed the body too. Yearning for a moment of what Jane would call closure, even forced closure, Elwin recalled his father’s oft-stated ambition, cribbed from Jonas Salk: to be a good ancestor. “You were,” he said aloud to the room. The room said nothing in return, certainly no indication that Elwin was a good descendant. The man who’d consecrated his life to the study of the past, Elwin thought, had bequeathed just one thing to the future: his children. Jane, Elwin, and David: These were his sole attempts at deep-time communication.

  Elwin didn’t know where to start. He’d brought bags with him, and there were cardboard boxes in the trunk if he needed them. He picked his father’s eyeglasses off the nightstand and mindlessly wiped the oily smears from their lenses with his shirttail. The eyeglasses had been resting atop one of the leather-bound notebooks his father’d always favored—demanded, really—for his writing. One of his many stubborn quirks. He refused to write in anything else, and a year ago, when Elwin discovered the company that made them was fading into bankruptcy, Elwin had bought an entire case of them. The unopened case was still in his basement, and though he’d briefly considered posting it for sale on Craigslist, too, he’d held off. He’d never shaken the dumb hope, he supposed, that his father would find some secret back exit out of the diagnosis, would refute all the clinical forecasts, and fill every one of those notebooks with his hyperactive pen-scrawl—the hope Jane was always upbraiding him for. He brought the notebook to his lap, and opening it to the first page he began to read.