The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  “That’s boring. Games are boring. I like knowing what people are doing and telling them what I’m doing.”

  “Don’t tell Lindstrom what you’re doing. He doesn’t care.”

  She tipped her chair back to lean against the wall, grinning. “Are you jealous of Eric?”

  “That’s creepy. Don’t—”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “Megan, stop it. You’re being ridiculous.”

  Then, leaning a little forward, she let her chair slam back down. Her eyes went dead and her lips thinned to a tight line. “This doesn’t feel like special time.”

  Above her on the kitchen wall hung a poster-size sheet of paper on which one sentence had been written with a large black marker, “I will not steal money from anyone, even if I think they don’t care about it,” with Megan’s big, loopy signature next to it. He’d made this poster the other night after she’d stolen coins from a jar atop his dresser to spend at the county fair. Beside, above, and under this sheet were a dozen others sporting different signed claims.

  “Why don’t we work together on Lindstrom’s assignment? What’s your chosen creature?”

  “Tonight I have to write a paper for English. It’s about this book.” She pulled a small blue paperback out of her bag, The Housekeeper and the Professor.

  “A book report?”

  “We have to come up with a thesis and then support it. I want to write, ‘In this book nothing happens.’”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Megan. What’s the book about?”

  “An old man can only remember eighty minutes at a time.” She riffled the page corners and tapped her feet. “He has this housekeeper who brings her son to work and they talk about baseball.”

  “Well—”

  “And math, he’s like a math wizard.”

  “Who, the old man?”

  “Yeah, and the guy is covered in pieces of paper that remind him of things.”

  “So you need to find a theme in there. Does the author think memory is all-important, or does this old guy still have a decent quality of life with such short-term memory? In a way, he’s like a human Snapchat, isn’t he? Is there value in not remembering everything? You know, when people have electroshock treatments—and only when people are severely depressed does this happen—it does help many of them and it seems to do this in large part by wiping away memories. Memories can be debilitating. Is this part of what the story is about?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You try to imagine what the author’s purpose was in telling this story in the way that he or she did.”

  Her jaw fell slack as she stared at the cover.

  “I know that’s what’s hard for you,” said Davis, “imagining what other people think and feel.”

  “I just don’t see what the point is.”

  “If you want to connect with people, to have a real relationship with anyone, they need to know that you care about how they feel, that you want to know. So, that would be the reason.”

  Her phone made the glug, glug, glug sound that announced a play on Words with Friends and she snatched it up like it offered a portal to a better world.

  # # #

  Megan feared driving because she had no control of the others on the road. She usually sighed all the way to the college on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when she drove Davis and herself there so she could attend Lindstrom’s course. Then at lunchtime, Jenny picked her up and delivered her to the high school. Despite her fear, or maybe because of it, Megan was a pretty good driver, and, unlike most teen girls, she didn’t veer off when a squirrel or a bird was in the road. She hit it. Which, Davis had to admit, was the safest thing to do. Because of Megan’s typical driving state, Davis didn’t think much of it when, halfway to the school, she began emitting a continuous nasal en, a mosquito sound that grew in volume until he was forced to burst out with “What?”

  “I can’t drive! I can’t drive!” she yelled, eyes bulging like their car was rolling toward a cliff.

  “Pull over,” he told her, but she stopped in the middle of the road and began to wail.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, my God!” She crammed her eyes shut.

  Davis looked right and left. “What’s happening?”

  “No! I can’t talk about it!”

  “Fine.” He shoved his papers back into his briefcase. “Get in the back seat. I’ll drive. Just get in the back.” He waved at the young, unkempt couple in the car behind them as he walked around.

  After they were both in place, he put the car into drive and eased forward. Her face was contorted in the rearview mirror. “Are you in pain, Megan?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “Well, I don’t know whether to take you to class or take you home. What shall it be?”

  “Home! I’m, like, ripping open!” Her whole head was purpling.

  Davis made the next right in order to circle back to the house. “Will you tell Mom where the pain is?”

  When he got Megan home, she ran up to her room. Jenny soon followed, and Davis was about to leave again, but instead he crept up to the master bedroom, which shared a wall with Megan’s, and listening there, he learned that not only had Megan had an IUD inserted the day before but that Jenny had taken her.

  He drove back to work in a fury. He’d been cut out! After all he’d done to make Jenny’s ill-conceived, impulsive adoption decision work for her, she’d cut him out of the discussion. Why? Well, clearly she would rather wish Megan’s issues away than work to contain them. He imagined, again, having taken another path in life; his mind drifted back to Aletta—his South African beauty, Aletta Van Der Hooft. She’d been teaching at the University of Vermont with him for two whole months before he’d encountered her, which ought to have been inexcusable, but because of widespread fear of then four-year-old Megan, he’d not been invited to Aletta’s welcoming party. Early, very early, Megan had injured others; babies especially; she twisted and poked their delicate, malleable bits. And no threat was effective. Put her out of the car? Fine. There she would stand. Spank her? She passed the time. Hurting others was, if not fun, a release of some sort. This behavior signaled the end of Davis and Jenny’s friendships with other parents.

  Oh Aletta, Aletta! She had been filling in during Karen Smith-Walker’s sabbatical, and finally she appeared at his door one afternoon, wearing some kind of lovely, indigenous, fringed poncho. “Well, off course, the reebbits’ horns wehr warts, but who could haff eemagined eet?” She sashayed into his office. “I want to know the mehn who could eemagine such creatures and how they came to be, to penetrate your brain.” Machine-gun-like speech, with the last T of penetrate sparking in the narrowing space between them.

  Davis’s office was a miniature version of his home-based crypto museum, with more skulls on shelves, still more display cases lined with plaster footprints, and a wall-mounted rabbit’s head with deer horns made by a student in honor of Davis’s jackalope-due-to-virus theory.

  “Davis Beardsley.” He stood and held out his hand for her.

  Hours later, Davis found he could hardly see his menu at the dark bar of the Chinese Bistro and it was only three p.m. Aletta hadn’t even bothered to open hers and just smiled at him, lips closed, like waiting to tell him he’d won an award. The mirror behind the bottles of booze had Chinese symbols frosted onto it. He saw they had Tanqueray, which he suddenly longed for.

  “I believe they have crab Rangoon,” Davis announced. “Do you like crab Rangoon?”

  She dug a silver cigarette case out of her bag and set it on the bar. “Tell me the eureka moment.” Her r’s had a slight, thrilling trill. She’d read his whole dissertation. They ordered a few plates from the bartender, and while they awaited their food, she had many questions for him. He was sure she had talked a little of her own work, but mostly she was interested in his. She got him.

  Once the barman had delivered the appetizers, Aletta announced, “You are a mehn of great pehssions.
” Then she moved one of the Rangoons over onto his little plate and reached for her silver case. “Great eensight and great pehssion. Like my father.”

  He put his hand over hers on the case. “It’s not allowed in this country, smoking indoors. We’re Puritans, I’m afraid.” Then he ordered two more martinis. “I would like to know more about your father.”

  # # #

  He passed by one of her classes the next day and put his face against the narrow glass window in the door. She paced the aisles as she lectured, stopping often to touch a student’s arm or shoulder and ask for input. She laughed easily with them, as she had with him. He could tell that her male students craved her.

  That evening, as soon as he entered the house, Jenny played a voice mail for him: Aletta purring about how she would adore meeting for “coffee and a ceegarette.” Jenny had listened to it often enough that she mouthed the words along with the recording. “Who’s that?” she then asked in unobscured terror, and Davis forced himself to study the facts: He was married to a woman who had only ever wished the best for him, who cared for him, and who had placed herself and a troubled little Romanian in his care. So he erased the nascent dream from his mind. He tapped a rolled note into Aletta’s box the very next morning, saying he could not meet with her again, ever.

  With that excruciating act of loyalty, he could never have imagined fast-forwarding to this betrayal—Megan secretly on birth control!—and now this debacle had made him twenty minutes late to his first class, which, he could see upon entering, was being overseen by Eric Lindstrom.

  “And here he is,” Lindstrom coolly announced.

  “Sorry, family emergency.” Davis rushed down the steps of the lecture hall.

  “No problem, no problem. I was here to observe and had the pleasure of offering a mini-lesson on invertebrates.”

  “Thanks, I’m sure you have a class now, too.” Davis swung his paper-blooming satchel up onto the desk.

  “No, no. I’m here for you. I need to observe your teaching. So without further ado.” His hard heels struck a path up to the back.

  It was a known part of the tenure review, but Davis was discombobulated. “I’m sorry,” he called out to Lindstrom, “but this really isn’t a good day. Can we reschedule?”

  “Teach, man, teach! I’m invisible!” The seated Lindstrom towered over the wilting students in the back row.

  Davis felt an imaginary IUD piercing his insides. He’d forgotten his topic for the day. He couldn’t even review the previous topic because he’d forgotten that, too. “Today,” he began, finally, “I’d like to introduce you all to cryptozoology.” He clasped his hands in front. “‘What?’” He fixed an annoyed expression. “‘Is this a Halloween thing?’ No, it’s not about zombie crypts.” He pulled out the desk drawer to search for a marker. “The term brings together three Greek words: kryptos, which means hidden, zoon, which, as you know, means animal, and logos, which is discourse. It’s the study of hidden animals. Now, when we think of hidden in this case, the animals are not hidden from everyone.” He gave up looking for a marker and began a ponderous pacing, appearing to be talking loudly to himself. “There have been local sightings. Legends may even have grown up around these animals, but they have remained hidden to the people with the authority to formally identify and catalogue them. How often do you think this has happened, that there are tales of strange animals that are only much later discovered by science?” He stopped before one of the students. He knew her name. “Michelle?”

  “Lots.”

  “Yes, lots and lots.” Lindstrom had walked back down to the front to hand him a marker. “Thank you. And cryptozoologists”—Davis moved quickly to write the word on the board—“cryptozoologists also are concerned with animals that are reported to be living in areas they have not been known to inhabit. So, basically what we’re interested in, then, is the unexpected,” noted and underlined. “Like all explorers, we must remain open to the unexpected. Bernard Heuvelmans, who published On the Track of Unknown Animals”—Davis wrote the title and his students knew to copy it—“in 1955 and who actually coined the term cryptozoology, explained that this is a study of animals who are ‘truly singular, unexpected, paradoxical, striking, emotionally upsetting, and thus capable of mystification.’” He looked about the room. “Any interest in this here? Wouldn’t you like to study some emotionally upsetting animals?

  “Well, okay, how does a cryptozoologist work?” He went up on his toes as he was asking. “It helps to speak many languages, because you will be reading accounts in local papers around the world.” He dug a book out of his satchel and shook it in the air. “And you’ll be hunched over tomes in libraries, reading old tales of wondrous sights, examining great artworks in museums for depictions of the exotic; you’ll decode DNA and identify bacteria in the lab; you’ll examine related species in far-flung zoos.” He let his jaw drop and scoped out the class. “Any interest? We’re supposed to be whipping up interest in our freshmen, helping to sustain them through their studies. ‘Say, Dr. Beardsley?’” he asked himself in an odd little voice, “‘is this about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster? Should we be talking about this in a college setting?’” Davis shrugged, twisted the toe of a shoe against the wooden floor. “Well, you tell me. When will we have reached the end of all large-animal zoological discoveries? French naturalist and zoologist Baron Georges Cuvier claimed that that era had ended in 1812. Seven years later, the South American tapir was discovered, a three-hundred-pound animal! The second-largest land mammal on the continent! And, guess what? Last year, just last year, a new species of tapir was identified in Brazil, hidden from science but not from the locals. Perhaps you read in yesterday morning’s papers that an Australian expedition has dragged over three hundred previously unknown species out of an ocean abyss during the past month—many were bioluminescent; one species was the headline-grabbing ‘faceless fish.’ So let’s not kid ourselves.” He looked squarely at Lindstrom. “Let’s not kid ourselves.

  “The hoaxes get to us, though, don’t they?” He flopped into the desk chair, pulled out some of the flaps of paper emerging from his satchel, and made a neat pile of them. “They bring us down. They limit us. People looking for attention, newspapers looking to sell copies—I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of repeating their stories here. Oh, sure, sometimes it’s fun, but a lot of damage has been done by hoaxes.” He gave the group a challenging look. “Because of them, some mainstream biologists think this is a pseudoscience.”

  Lindstrom let his head flop to the side and pursed his lips in displeasure.

  “Have you gone on any searches?” a young woman asked.

  “I’ve been up to Washington state as a leader in several field expeditions.” He tapped on his desk like he was marking a spot on a map. “Most of the reported Sasquatch encounters have been there, in Pierce County, with the last one being in May. On one expedition, hiking up Mount Rainier with a team of four other scientists, we heard a call that was uncanny, just spooked the heck out of us one morning, coming from very nearby, and it prompted me to grip my Taurus Tracker three fifty-seven, which is really a great option for quick, accurate shooting that can be fatal for a large animal—not that I would ever want to shoot a cryptid, but, of course, that may be the only way to prove the existence of one as shy as Sasquatch. Anyway, it wouldn’t show itself on that day. It just wasn’t to be.” Though he would not admit it here, he knew that if he ever saw the great beast, he would absolutely shoot it. And he would drag the thing down the mountain himself if he had to. The ultimate vindication lying at his feet. This was often what he pictured just before sex.

  Lindstrom coughed, and all heads turned toward him as he stood and, after motioning for the students in his row to clear their legs from the passageway, left the room.

  TIM

  I need a new man.

  Tim gaped at the Snapchat photo of the gorgeous blonde, hand on hip, standing next to Chewbacca for the six seconds that it existed. A Californi
a girl with attitude. Bit of an Amazon, this one. It was the first Snapchat that Blondie had sent since asking him to download the app. The first photo of her. “Wow,” he Snapchatted back, “Not sure I’m UR type based on this guy.”

  Mike from shipping appeared at the door. “You busy?” he asked when Tim finally looked up. “The Troll gave me a big lecture today on not signing for anything.”

  “Deliveries?”

  “Or mail. I’m not to sign for anything. She says if we don’t sign for it, then we can say we never got it. I think she was talking about legal things from lawyers or the courts.”

  “Maybe this is about the ex-boyfriend.”

  “That’s what I wonder.” Mike slouched against the doorway. “Her mind’s always going. She’s always thinking someone’s out to get her.”

  Tim’s phone pinged:

  Marine is my type.

  “Just got an invitation for cybersex,” he said, crossing his arms to mask his glee.

  Mike whispered, “The Words with Friends girl?”

  “Yeah, BlondeBabeWhatever.”

  “Who are you in this deal?”

  Tim hesitated. “Marine sniper in Afghanistan.”

  “Into the Lion’s Mouth! Aw, I knew you’d love it. That guy was one hot shit.” He leaned out to survey the hall. “I could stand guard.”

  Tim smirked. “If I want to have sex with a person who won’t be touching me, I can do it with my own wife.”

  “Hey, hey, I told you about The Publisher’s big place in Kennebunkport?” Mike asked. “She don’t use it now till summertime. I’m staining the deck this weekend, and I’m trying to get a girl up there. Just something about doing a girl in the boss’s beach house gets to me, more than normal. I mean, just putting my naked butt down on The Troll’s floral sofa gives me a chubby.”

  Tim’s phone rang, and Mike waved off.

  “Tim Turner,” he answered.

  “This is about an interview?” It was Joe. Joe Masotta.