Weather

by Jenny Offill

  * * *

  …

  Sylvia takes me to a swanky dinner with some people visiting from Silicon Valley. Some of them are donors to her podcast and she hopes to convince them to support a new foundation she has started. It wants to rewild half the earth.

  But these men are not interested in such things. De-extinction is a better route, they think. Already they are exploring the genetic engineering that would be necessary. Woolly mammoths are of great interest to them. Saber-tooth tigers too.

  Somehow, I get seated halfway down the table from her. I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means.

  His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained.

  But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?

  He ignores this, blurs right past me to list all the ways he and his kind have changed the world and will change the world. He tells me that smart houses are coming, that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of things, blah, blah, blah, and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world. He asks me what my favored platforms are.

  I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever.

  Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!

  He looks at me and I can see him calculating all the large and small ways I am trying to prevent the future. “Well, good luck with that, I guess,” he says.

  Later, Sylvia tells me her end of the table was even worse. The guy in the Gore-Tex jacket was going on and on about transhumanism and how we would soon shed these burdensome bodies and become part of the singularity. “These people long for immortality but can’t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee,” she says.

  * * *

  …

  A new member of the meditation class tells a story about going to a monastery. He says that the atmosphere was incredible, like nothing he had ever experienced. Margot looks at him. “It is only the people who visit the monastery who feel anything. The people in the monastery feel nothing,” she says. I can’t help it. I laugh. “Sit straighter,” she says to me, and her voice is like a sharp stick.

  * * *

  …

  Okay, okay, I have officially wrecked my knee with all this gallivanting around. Last night, the pain was so bad I couldn’t sleep. Ben insists I get it checked out this week. But before I go, I have some questions. Like what if it’s gout? “It is definitely not gout,” he tells me. “Could it be arthritis? I’m too young for that, right?” He nods. “You are way too young, plus that comes much more slowly.”

  That night, I dream that I am in a supermarket. Bad music is playing. It’s pitilessly lit. I walk up and down the aisles, trying to dim the lights, but I can’t find the switch. I wake up, disappointed. What happened to the flying dreams?

  * * *

  …

  On the way there, Mr. Jimmy has questions for me. What are these shows about, really? Is there a takeaway message? No, I tell him. But actually there is.

  First, they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not a coral…

  At the clinic, the doctor manipulates my knee. He asks me if I have any other conditions. “Such as?” “Gout?” “How would I know if I had gout?” I say, my voice rising weirdly. “Oh, you’d know,” he says. He sends me in for X-rays.

  The technician is older than me, relentlessly cheerful, joking about how she can barely stand up after repositioning the machine. “Don’t laugh at the broken-down old tech,” she says. “I’m fine. Don’t laugh at me.” I worry that she is modeling something for me, some sort of way I am supposed to deal with adversity and affliction. “No chance of being pregnant,” she says. Not as a question. She puts the heavy lead apron around my waist anyway.

  I stand three different ways. The last one is like a yoga pose, hurt leg bent and forward, the other straight. A wave of pain and nausea hits me. I stand back up, blinking hard. She is still behind the glass, chattering at me. She sends me back into the little room to wait.

  The doctor comes back after a while. “Good news,” he says. “Nothing to worry about.” I go home with a piece of paper. Osteoarthritis, minor degeneration, it says. I look it up on the train.

  Osteoarthritis develops slowly and the pain it causes worsens over time.

  Right, okay, steady on. Later, when I tell Ben the gout story, my voice is less jaunty than I intend. I make a little joke and the room steadies. But I saw his eyes. I know what he’s remembering. That time the dog’s muzzle went gray.

  * * *

  …

  Henry doesn’t seem to notice I’m hobbling a little. He is filling me in on the new job Catherine got him. He’s a copywriter now for some low-rent greeting card company. It’s those kinds of cards that are very long and very specific about all the things the recipient has done for the sender.

  To a Step-Aunt Who Was Always There…

  To a Hospitalized Second Cousin…

  Sometimes they rhyme, but mostly they are free verse. Henry gets paid by the word, so the more flowery the better. Even so, he already got into an argument with his boss about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.

  You have to kiss the ring, Catherine said.

  * * *

  …

  In the morning, the adjunct comes by to say hello. He looks pale. I worry he is selling his plasma again. He tells me that his classroom was locked yesterday and he had to wait in the hallway for an hour until someone finally came to open it. By then all his students had left. But he tells me he is getting better at handling such things. At first, it was unnerving to work somewhere where no one remembers your name, where you have to call security to get into your own room, but as regular life becomes more fragmented and bewildering, it bothers him less and less, he says.

  Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism?

  A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. “You can’t outrun a bear,” the other whispers. “I just have to outrun you,” he says.

  When I get home, Eli is watching audition tapes of those people who want to go on a one-way trip to Mars. This one has found a brand-new way, never before used in history, to skip out on his wife and kids. It’s difficult, of course, to consider leaving his family forever and never meeting his future grandchildren. But he’s intrigued by the idea of making history and seeing things no one has ever seen before. His wife and children don’t like the idea much. They are afraid they will have to watch him die on television.

  Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to grow old.

  Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape old age.

  Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to get sick.

  Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape sickness.

  Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to die.

  Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape dying.

  Breathing in, I know that one day I will have to let go of everything and everyone I love.

  Breathing out, I know there is no way to bring them along.

  Aw, c’mon, man. Everything and everyone I love? Is there one for beginners maybe?

  * * *

  …

  That drug dealer who lives in 5C always surprises me. He’s big and sleepy-eyed, but his reflexes are lightning quick. Today a grocery bag I was carrying broke, and he caught the
glass bottle of oil before it hit. He has a baby girl who doesn’t live with him, a beautiful dog, and a small jagged scar on his neck. Once I asked if he grew up in the neighborhood and he smiled and shook his head. I just kind of bounced around as a kid, he told me. A little bit here, a little bit there.

  * * *

  …

  Another conference, this one in the heartland. Sylvia gives a lecture while I sit in the front row, holding her purse like a proper assistant. She talks about a book called Nature and Silence. There is no higher or lower, it says. Everything is equally evolved.

  Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved. After all, they have about three hundred million olfactory receptors in their noses compared with our six million. If we privileged longevity, it would be bristlecone pines, which can live for several thousand years. And you could make a case that banana slugs are sexually superior to us. They are hermaphrodites who mate up to three times a day.

  There are a lot of questions afterward. Some of them are friendly; some are not. But Sylvia stands firm on her idea that humans are nothing particularly special. “The only thing we are demonstrably better at than other animals is sweating and throwing,” she says.

  Now I’m on a park bench, noting the scattered lettuce of someone else’s sandwich. I clean it up, then resent doing it. On the way back, I don’t notice anything underfoot, anything overhead. Possibly there was a light coming greenly through the leaves. Impossible to be sure.

  What is the Nano Hummingbird? What is the Robofish?

  * * *

  …

  When I get home, the dog is in the kitchen, tearing a rawhide bone into slobbery bits. My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden. Later, I spend some time trying to find out the dog’s secret name, but she’s not having it.

  * * *

  …

  The first reading of the year is the newly sober English professor. He has been writing poetry at rehab. One of them is from the point of view of a hat being worn by a beautiful woman. After he reads it, he directs some remarks to his students in attendance. “I have written about a hat though I have never been a hat,” he says. Later, as we are boxing up the unsold books, I find a card someone has left for him.

  You’ve received this card because your privilege is showing.

  Your words/actions are making others feel uncomfortable.

  Check your privilege.

  [ √ ] White

  [ √ ] Heterosexual

  [ √ ] Male

  [ √ ] Neuro-typical

  [ √ ] Socioeconomic

  [ √ ] Citizen

  “What do you think this is?” he asks me.

  The future?

  * * *

  …

  And the lonely heart engineer wants to downsize the government. A desire for a small government is nothing new, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a U.S. government official proposed closing the office of patents. Everything of importance had already been invented, he said.

  Ben is reading a book about pre-Socratic philosophy. I’ve always had an obsession with lost books, all the ones half written or recovered in pieces. So today in my lunch, I find a sandwich, a cookie, and a note from him.

  Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.

  (Democritus wrote seventy books. Only fragments survive.)

  * * *

  …

  I really need to unpack this suitcase. Are you trying to tell me something? Ben asked last night as he stepped over it again. We have these little Are you leaving me? jokes. The oldest one goes like this:

  Be right back, I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes, the man tells his wife.

  (Years pass.)

  * * *

  …

  I swear the hippie letters are a hundred times more boring than the end-timer ones. They are all about composting toilets and water conservation and electric cars and how to live lightly on the earth while thinking ahead for seven generations. “Environmentalists are so dreary,” I tell Sylvia. “I know, I know,” she says.

  * * *

  …

  Outside the library, the woman who is always on the bench is talking about Thanksgiving. She’s had enough, she doesn’t want to go anymore, she tells someone. It’s May, but I think she’s smart to plan ahead. She has long gray hair, a briefcase filled with papers. There are various stories about who she used to be. Grad student still working on her dissertation is a popular one. But my boss says she once worked in the cafeteria. I try to slip by her bench unnoticed, but she stops her conversation to ask me for money. I don’t have the usual dollar, just some coins and a twenty. Once in a fluster I gave her a ten, and ever since I’ve been a disappointment to her. I dig out some change from my pocket. She takes a careful look at the nickels and dimes. God blesses me anyway.

  * * *

  …

  One night, Ben’s mother calls from Florida, a.k.a. paradise. She wants to be buried there, she says. And she’s talked his father into it too. But there’s a problem. They already bought grave plots by their old synagogue. Could we maybe sell them to someone else for her? “I don’t know how we’d do that, Mom,” he says. She offers that we could take them ourselves, but Ben doesn’t want to be buried in Hackensack, New Jersey.

  I think of the time Sylvia interviewed that famous futurist. She asked him what was coming next, and he repeated his best-known prediction: Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.

  * * *

  …

  Some of the people at this private dinner have begun to invest in floating cities, the kind that can be anchored in international waters and run by unmeddlesome governments, but our hosts are gentler sorts, longtime listeners, they say. They take notes during Sylvia’s talk, but in the end they still have one nagging question: What will be the safest place? No one they’d consulted with would give them a straight answer.

  “But you’ve interviewed everyone. Is there any consensus? Any clustering patterns of these scientists and journalists? We’re not asking for ourselves, but we have children, you understand.”

  * * *

  …

  Catherine has made us a wholesome vegetarian dinner to celebrate that Henry is moving in. He lost his lease because the landlord’s son wants his apartment. If he had told her earlier, she would have helped him fight it, but he waited until the last minute.

  I understand his reluctance. The moment you tell Catherine about a problem she begins to act and she does not stop acting until the problem is solved. For this reason, my brother sometimes lets a problem go on for some time before telling her about it in order to prepare himself for the intensity of her mobilization.

  But it’s probably for the best, because here he is, bright-eyed and clean-shaven, serving us some kind of thing made of bulgur wheat. There are placemats and candlesticks too. I want to joke about how he is moving up in the world, but I resist. All this order is good for him maybe.

  For dessert, Catherine serves fruit with unsweetened whipped cream. My son rips his napkin into smaller and smaller pieces. “What is there to do here?” he whispers. Henry overhears and leans in to speak softly in his ear. Eli smiles.

  “What did you tell him?” I ask my brother later. “I told him nothing,” he says.

  * * *

  …

  This woman has just turned fifty. She tells me about her b
lurriness, the way she is hardly seen. She supposes she is not so pretty anymore—fattish, hair a bit gray. What she has noticed, what gives her a little chill, she tells me, is how if she meets a man out of the context of work, he finds her to not be worth much. He looks over her shoulder as he talks or pawns her off on a woman her own age. “I have to be so careful now,” she says.

  * * *

  …

  Eli and I are looking over his homework, which is mostly xeroxed worksheets. His social studies book was published twenty years ago. It’s called Lands and Peoples. “We always say Native American!” Eli says. “Never Indian. I thought Amira was an Indian, from India, but she is Bangladeshi.”

  This is the girl he loves. They are both EAGLEs. I tell him that in the reports they sent back from the New World, the colonists claimed there were spiders as big as cats and birds as small as thimbles. They wrote that there were flora and fauna so strange they dared not try to describe them. But this is not of interest to him. “Yes, Amira is from Bangladesh,” I say, on firm ground again.

  That night on the show, there’s an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it’s a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. “Those who live move,” he says.

  * * *

  …

  That’s Nicola outside the bakery. She’s on her phone, but as soon as she looks up, she’ll see me. I dart through the doorway just in time. She’s put her phone away and is striding purposefully down the street. But I’m safe in the hardware store.