The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  On the ride home, after dropping his mother off, Tim was appreciating God’s restraint regarding his transformation. Tim hadn’t yet fully prepared his family for success. And let’s face it, he realized, it was Miles that he needed to prepare the most. When they entered the Central Artery Tunnel, Tim put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and watched him recoil. “I’ve been thinking I might be able to teach you how to tell a funny story. It’s something I’d like to do for you. It’s usually something you pick up on your own, but there are some basic tenets.”

  “Dad, you’re driving, like, five miles an hour.”

  “First, think of a mortifying event in your life. This is key.”

  “That’d be right now.”

  “And it has to be your fault entirely, what’s happened. And you really build up to the event in the story, give it some high stakes. Then you end with futility.” He regripped the steering wheel. “Always end with futility.”

  After a minute, Miles said, “I actually told Brianne Mason, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’”

  “Wait—” Tim slowed again. “Why?”

  “She turned me down to go to this one kid’s party. Told me she was moving soon.”

  “Did you actually say ’tis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you trying to get her to change her mind? What were you doing?”

  “Yeah. Change her mind. Didn’t work, though, and then she spread it all around the school, and I got called Dickspeare, but it’s not even a Shakespeare quote, so I win.”

  “Miles, God, yes!” Tim punched the roof of the truck cab with his fist and then grappled on to the boy’s shoulder again and shook him. “That’s what I’m talking about! It’s absolutely the right direction. It needs a little more buildup when you tell it to people, like why her, and how long you’d pined for her, but you totally get this.”

  He accelerated, and they shot out of the tunnel and cruised over the majestic Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. “And if you wouldn’t have said ’tis? Not nearly as funny. Did you end up going to the party?”

  “No.”

  “Miles, you have to go to the party. For fuck’s sake. Go to the goddamn party.”

  # # #

  Your dad’s getting a package tomorrow. –Blondie

  DAVIS

  Davis had been starting all of his classes a little late, in case Lindstrom would be attending. He didn’t want the man to come in after the setting of the scene. He truly hoped that the visit would take place today, in this class, because it was time for his lecture on the evolution of tetrapods, which was directly related to their discussion of the coelacanth, and he would love to hear how the man could explain the tetrapods without evolution.

  When the students had all taken seats and had fully arranged their accoutrements and ended their little, immaterial conversations, Davis could see no way to postpone further, so he wrote tetrapods on the board. “From an ancient Greek word meaning ‘four-footed.’ All mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds are tetrapods.” And here he paused for a reaction, but none came. “Anything strange in what I just said?”

  “I don’t know of any four-footed birds,” one boy said.

  Davis nodded and looked around for any other forthcoming insights. Glancing also again at the door, he asked: “Right, and what about snakes? Hardly four-footed.” No, this classification comes not from how the animal moves about today, but rather from how its ancestors moved. Tetrapods are all of the organisms that evolved from the lobe-finned fishes that began to walk on land four hundred million years ago. Lobe-fins had fin bones homologous to the bones known as the radius, ulna, and humerus in forelimbs, and to the fibula, tibia, and femur in hind limbs. It is from imprints and the fossil record that we determined that the earliest tetrapods were not terrestrial. Their limbs could never have lifted their midsections high enough to clear the ground, and since we don’t see belly tracks in the ancient trackways, we must conclude that they walked in shallow water, which buoyed their midsections.

  “So fish developed limbs, but what about the ability to breathe out of water? How did that happen? Well, the evidence suggests that the common ancestor of both ray-finned and lobe-finned fishes had lungs and gills. Both. In the ray-fins, the lungs evolved into gas-filled swim bladders useful for buoyancy, since a fish is heavier than water. This meant that they didn’t have to constantly swim. But the lobe-fins, some of them, continued to breathe atmospheric air and began to colonize shallow brackish waters and even swamps that periodically dried up. They developed bodies better suited to these environments: flatter bodies, with the eyes moving first to the tops of their heads to see above the water, and then, once they ventured onto land, down again and to the front of what became tall, narrow skulls. They developed necks so they could look around for food. And they grew digits to aid in walking, first eight on each limb, then fewer and fewer until arriving at today’s common five, and not all terrestrial animals stayed on land. Whales and dolphins, for instance, had a terrestrial ancestor but returned to the water at some point, still breathing atmospheric air.

  “So, adaptation. It’s what we do. I’ve described it here on a large biological scale, but we adapt all day long, to each environment we enter. And I like to think, whenever I’m faced with a very difficult situation, that I’m always adaptable to it. Einstein said, ‘The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.’

  “Now, what I’d like you to do is choose a partner. Just turn to the person next to you—your peer—and I want you to discuss and write down what other adaptations the first terrestrial tetrapods likely would have made and why. It’s a fun exercise. So you make a list of predictions and then, when you read chapter thirteen, you’ll find out how close you were.”

  He watched the students move from stunned silence to chair scrapings and murmurs, a low conversational drone reverberating while he put on his jacket and sat at his desk. He liked to imagine being among the first terrestrial tetrapods, with no predators and an embarrassment of vegetative riches spreading out from the wetlands. It was no wonder they’d exploded in number and variety. There he was, hunting arthropods among the ferns until the wall clock’s minute hand clicked home, and he stood and walked out. When he emerged from the building, it was so foggy, he had to make his car beep in order to find it.

  He was halfway to the usual diner, his headlights sculpting cones of light, when his phone rang. Scrabbling around in his pockets, he got the phone out and pressed it to his ear. “Yes? Yes?” he said before remembering to press the answer icon.

  “Davis Beardsley?” asked a woman with an accent. Was it Aletta?

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sheila Dunn at Sunnyside Village; I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your aunt Selma passed away this morning.”

  “Did she? Oh,” he sighed.

  “Please accept our condolences. You’re the only relative she has on record to call.” The woman’s voice was attractive. He decided she was British.

  “Well, I’m her only nephew. She had no kids, and my mom has passed, too—her sister.”

  “She left good instructions on what she wanted done. She wanted to be cremated.”

  “Okay.”

  “What should we do with her things?”

  “What are they?”

  “Some artwork and knickknacks, I suppose.”

  “Well I can’t come down to look at them, so you can do what you normally do, I guess.”

  “We could give them to charity.”

  Why couldn’t he remember Aletta’s face? He remembered her body, and her lustrous hair bound up in a chignon, but the face was gone. “Are any of them worth anything?”

  “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

  “Can you have an appraiser come in? Is that a lot of trouble?” That was how the Brits liked to talk, he knew, everything in questions rather than demands.

  “I think we could do. Let me check. And shall I give you her lawyer’s contact infor
mation?”

  “Yes. Just a moment while I pull over. You know, I didn’t even know she was sick. We exchanged Christmas cards, and she didn’t say anything about her health. That was a while ago, of course.” Why hadn’t he ever called his aunt? Is a phone call so difficult? Could Megan be blamed for this, requiring, as she did, such complete focus? Yes, he decided, yes, she could.

  # # #

  Even in the dark, Davis could tell that Jenny was nervous with him there in her classroom, sitting in the back on the diorama-laden table. Her voice was thin and high as she described Central Asia using the first of geography’s five themes: Location. A colored political map filled the big whiteboard once she had launched her presentation. She was using some futuristic application that didn’t move from slide to slide but rather worked off a big concept map from which she zoomed in on one section at a time by tapping on the relevant spot and then zoomed away when she tapped elsewhere.

  He’d come to tell her about the money he was getting from his aunt, but he’d been locked out of the school building and forced to ring a buzzer and then made to give his driver’s license to a woman in the office, who was impatiently paused from some page-counting task. The Pope, hanging above the counter, kindly watched over the driver’s license transaction. Davis wondered if other husbands were better known here and were simply beckoned in with a droll comment. He thought he should attempt some light banter: “Good day to be a bank robber.” But she simply slid his Visitor sticker across the desk and deepened the frown.

  The hall decorations spoke of a schoolwide study of Asia: “Check Out China!” read one banner beneath paper Chinese lanterns dangling from the ceiling. On the wall were illustrations of something called a dragon dance and a photo of a giant panda (past cryptid).

  “This region is sometimes called the stans because all of the countries share that suffix,” Jenny told her students, who were surprisingly still and quiet for fifth graders. Their desks were arranged in groups of four, proving that even Jenny subscribed to the notion of peer study. In the dim room, the many backpacks slung over chairs put Davis in mind of clinging squid.

  “Stan means “homeland,” so Uzbekistan is the homeland of the Uzbeks. Afghanistan is the homeland of Afghans.” She kept her focus on the whiteboard, rarely looking back, probably so as to block Davis out of her mind. Lecturing was his sphere; it was Davis-stan. Next screen: Place, Physical Characteristics was the heading, and under it was a physical map. “Look at my map here. What do you see, Liam? What’s this in the southeast?” She rubbed a palm over the rugged terrain. “Mountains,” the boy quickly stated, clearly her Michael Harren (Davis’s most ardent crypto-acolyte). “And what about the white areas here?” She flapped her hand near the areas of highest elevation. “It’s snow,” said a girl. Davis pictured a yeti paradise of jagged crystal peaks. “We learned about glaciers last week,” Jenny said. “Could these be glaciers?” She peered closely at the image, the reflected light deepening the fissures around her mouth. In normal lighting conditions, she was still lovely, he thought, her face a little plumper, but still dear.

  “These are some of the highest mountains in the world,” she told them, pointing generally at the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. “They are part of the Himalayas, like in China and Tibet.” Davis smiled at his shoes. They were certainly not the Himalayas, but separate ranges entirely.

  With a touch, the map shrank away and a dazzling photo zoomed in, a pile of candy-colored gems with the heading Human-Environment Interaction.

  Davis could understand that screen-based learning was essential for today’s youth, but when had Jenny become a technology wizard?

  “That’s right, Jamal, gems are minerals,” she said. “And what is the main difficulty in getting to those minerals right now in a place like Afghanistan?” Another image swooped onto the screen, a seemingly infinite vista with an armed American soldier in the center, shown from behind as he surveyed the valley.

  “You can get really killed,” a boy said.

  “That’s an AK-forty-seven,” shouted a peer.

  “Is it?” Jenny asked, turning toward the child with interest. She was really a lovely person, wanting to encourage. How often had she asked just such a question of Davis when he had made some observation. She then stepped in front of the physical map on the whiteboard and opened her hands over the vast steppes of Central Asia, as though they’d just popped out of a hat.

  TIM

  He’d seen it when he’d driven up to Sunny Straub’s house the last time, that same stupid sign from years ago, now disintegrating, barely legible on the big plate-glass window: NORTH SHORE PIANO, WHERE IT’S ALL BLACK AND WHITE. He wondered if Chip deCarlo still worked there. Slowing the truck, he hunted for his beach ball silhouette. Tim and his crew used to move their pianos. This was back when parents bought pianos automatically, like they did encyclopedias. There was constant work then. But it’s a younger man’s game, piano-hauling. A baby grand starts at five hundred pounds, with a full concert grand going up to thirteen hundred, the weight of a dairy cow. You have to understand balance and inertia to move these giants. You have to wrap them like an egg you’re sending off the Empire State Building. And you work for people who don’t believe that you and your red-nosed crew can do the job, who grip their cheeks when you tip their treasure onto the dolly and who breathe onto your back as you wheel it over the threshold. Still, he’d done it for years, until he crushed his knees.

  “Has someone determined that this is a growth industry?” deCarlo now asked him, examining Tim’s new piano-tuning-business card from behind the glass counter where the metronomes were displayed. “I promise you, whatever you charge, I can get a blind guy to do it for less.” Why hadn’t Tim thought about all of the blind tuners? It was like a cartel. “Two other guys came in just last week. Took some online class. I’m like, are you kidding me with this?”

  “Online? Jesus. No, I just thought I’d pop in, say hello,” Tim said, repeating his opening line. “I’m kind of surprised you’re still open.”

  “Now till Christmas it’s busy.” The guy breathed loudly on the intake. “You ever get in with an orchestra?”

  “No,” Tim said.

  “I didn’t figure.”

  “Yeah, no.”

  “Well, I do need movers. I got a big mama needs to go out this Friday.”

  Tim looked like he was still waiting for the guy to finish talking. Then he shoved his hands into his anorak pockets and said he’d take a look at where the piano needed to go and see if his old crew was still around. Rusty would still need money when he came into being, and he’d had to put his father-in-law’s twenty-five K into their checking, where Mona could see it.

  Then he took his time getting back to work, since he’d claimed he was at the dentist.

  # # #

  Miles was chunking out a few stray chords on his keyboard when Tim opened his bedroom door after work.

  “What?” the kid said, collapsing into himself.

  “Let’s take a trip. C’mon.”

  “Where?”

  “To the moon. C’mon, zip up your pants, let’s go.”

  Miles came out of the house ten minutes later, his hoodie up against the rain, and folded himself into the truck. “Seriously, Dad, where’re we going?”

  “To see a man about a piano,” Tim said. “I thought it’d be good for you to see the outside.”

  “Ha.”

  “We’re going to see how much of a bitch it will be to move a piano.”

  “Thought you weren’t doing that anymore.”

  “Just because you declare things doesn’t mean they can be so.”

  “Yeah.”

  After pulling onto the street, Tim did a double take on Miles’s cystic face. “God, your face looks like a hundred-wasp attack. Does it hurt?”

  “Huh? No. Not really.”

  “There’s gotta be something you can take, some pill.”

  “Mum’s looking into it.”

  “Saturday w
e go to a machine-gun range in New Hampshire.”

  “No,” Miles reverently whispered, checking Tim’s expression.

  “They have an AK-forty-seven.”

  Miles pounded his knees. “Ahh! I am literally pooping my pants right now. I wonder if I can even handle a machine gun.”

  “‘Course you can, but listen, before then, I could use some aiming practice on one of your games. I don’t wanna waste my money.”

  “Hells, yeah. I have the best weapons,” the boy told him. Then after a minute, he screamed, “This is awesome! I mean, like, I am ripping my tits off!” He grabbed handfuls of his shirt and looked up, grinning, to acknowledge a benevolent God.

  # # #

  The house for the piano delivery was a yellow neo-Victorian, with an elaborate roof design, including two Chinese hats over the cylindrical sections, and dormers galore. The load-in looked easy enough—a few steps up from the sidewalk onto the porch and then right into the living room. Two children were clamped onto their mother in the doorway. People bought pianos for their kids because the piano came with an imagined future for the child as a charming adult surrounded by sophisticates. “You’re getting a piano!” Tim exclaimed to the frightened boys. “Do you know how special that is?” He told the woman he’d deliver it at six-thirty on Friday. “And not for me, but my guys usually get tipped,” he said. “It’s work you can only do for so long before having your spine fused.”

  # # #

  “Now we’re going to the AOH,” he told Miles when he was back in the truck cab. Tim had arranged to meet his old crew at the Ancient Order of Hibernians, although he thought he could probably just show up there any evening and find them.

  As they drove alongside a lake with enormous houses across the road, Miles asked, “Why did you pick our house?”

  “Screw you, Miles. You know why? It was one of only two houses in the whole metro area that we could afford, and the realtor said there’d be condos going in all around us—lofts for young professionals, a Starbucks. He said our house would explode in value.”