How would Whitman have tended such an illness, what gifts would he have distributed? No sides, no uniforms, no nation to be forged out of the suffering. I did the things one does, the institution speaking through me. I e-mailed my closest colleagues and the chair about my concerns and asked for advice. I e-mailed two students I thought were friends with Calvin and asked if they’d been in touch with him lately, without saying why. Then I e-mailed Calvin to say I was sorry if I’d upset him, but I was concerned about him and wanted to be of whatever help I could. I did not say that our society could not, in its present form, go on, or that I believed the storms were in part man-made, or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI fucks with citizens’ phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true. And that my mood was regulated by drugs. And that sometimes the language was a jumble of marks.
I looked closely at the legal pad. At the top were some phrases I’d used about O’Brien’s writing, placed in quotations, and then some of Calvin’s phrases about those phrases, e.g., “Could apply to Waldrop’s trilogy,” which were starred. But the bulk of the writing resembled a private code of miniaturized and simplified letters and vertical strokes or, in places, seismographic readouts — a shorthand for what our language couldn’t represent, a poem.
* * *
Around the time the storm struck Cuba, devastating Santiago, the box of books arrived at my apartment. I’d spared no expense on the self-publishing website, opting for a run of fifty hardcovers with full-color images — each book had cost around forty dollars. Anita wanted copies to mail to family in El Salvador; Aaron planned to put one in each of the classroom libraries; Roberto would want to share them with friends. I liked to think selling my unwritten novel had paid for these unsalable volumes, was proud of the excess I’d keep secret from Roberto. Eager to see what they looked like, I carried the surprisingly heavy box, no doubt increasing my intrathoracic pressure dramatically, upstairs to my apartment, where I opened it hurriedly, cutting away the brown packing tape with a key.
I realized I’d never been as happy to receive any of my own published volumes. Ripping the tape off, I suddenly had the strange sensation that I was opening a box filled with copies of the book for which I was being paid in advance; I hesitated, my eagerness evaporating, then opened the lid and saw the handsome copies of To the Future. The text itself was only four pages long, but those four pages were the result of months of Internet research, outlining, drafting by hand, typing, revising, formatting — each stage in the process of composition dilated into an academic lesson about grammar, computer literacy, etc. Professionally bound, it had a certain heft; it did not feel like a vanity project, but like a real children’s book. I was excited to think how excited Roberto would be.
Even the fifteen copies I was carrying grew heavy as I walked up Fourth Avenue toward Sunset Park, sweating profusely in the unseasonable humidity. The line at the BP gas station on Douglass Street stretched around the corner, motorists hoarding fuel before the storm, some filling red plastic containers in addition to their cars, but otherwise there was no sign of an imminent disaster. Eventually I moved to Fifth Avenue to avoid all the fencing and construction walkways where the new condos were going up on Fourth, “the latest in urban living.” By the time I reached Green-Wood Cemetery, my arms and shoulders ached from the weight of the little books, as if they had more than a material heaviness. As I passed I could hear the monk parakeets singing in the spires of the cemetery’s gate; generations of the bright green birds had been nesting there since they first escaped from a damaged crate at JFK. Before I reached the school, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the $2,000 could be used by Roberto’s family in much more practical ways. But then, Anita — assuming she needed it — would never accept money from me. Maybe Aaron could help arrange some small anonymous scholarship for Roberto once we’d finished working together; my advance could secretly fund more than one kind of largesse simultaneously. Or maybe I should be bankrolling Calvin’s therapy. Or maybe — I interrupted myself: You should celebrate, not second-guess, this kind of reckless expenditure; don’t calculate opportunity costs or insert it into the network of abstract exchange.
Roberto, however, was not in a celebratory mood. He smiled politely at the books, flipped through one, but didn’t seem proud or particularly impressed; I had to fight off the desire to tell him how much they’d cost to make. I kept congratulating him enthusiastically on becoming a published author, but to no avail. Instead, he wanted to talk about what he referred to as the “superstorm,” how he was worried he’d have to go live with his cousins in Pittsburgh. I explained, as Aaron had no doubt already explained, that Sunset Park was high up, out of reach of the water, and that, while his building or the school might lose power for a while, he had nothing to fear; he could rest assured his parents were prepared. But what if we run out of water to drink? he asked me. What if there are “water wars”? He’d clearly seen another special on the Discovery Channel.
Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030, but I assured him he had no reason to worry, and tried to refocus his attention on the high production value of our own study of extinction.
“What are we going to do next?” he asked. “Our next project?”
“I’m not sure,” I responded, frustrated. I wasn’t even sure how much longer I could work with Roberto once my leave ended and I began to face a real deadline for my book or became a kind of father. I’d imagined that To the Future might help bring us closure.
“Will we do another book?” He sounded as though he hoped we wouldn’t.
“You haven’t even looked at this one,” I said, trying to sound light, and not disappointed. “This is the product of all our hard work. We sweated over every sentence.”
“Because I want to make a movie next,” Roberto said, smiling a little apologetically. A mature incisor was coming in at a problematic angle, a new development since I’d left for Marfa. “Your iPhone has a movie camera. We can add lots of special effects and post it on YouTube.”
“Anybody can make a movie on their iPhone,” I said, “not everybody has published a book like this.” I rapped my knuckles on the hardcover. I felt like a used-car salesman.
“We could make a movie of the tsunami,” he said, meaning the hurricane. “It’s also good to have a camera to film people so they don’t try to rob you. Beat you up. To have surveying,” he said, meaning surveillance.
“Roberto,” I said, making myself smile, channeling Peggy Noonan, who was herself a channel, “what is this book about if not how science is always improving, correcting its past mistakes?” I thought of Judd’s boxes in the desert, their terrible patience. “A young future scientist like you should have some faith in our ability to fix things,” in our ability to colonize the moon. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave — to brave people with papeles, I didn’t go on to say. “People are going to work together to develop new solutions to all these problems you’re worried about. For instance,” I said, “they”—whoever they were—“are developing new seawalls to keep the water out, special floodgates.” I resolved to continue our work together: “Maybe we should write a book about that next? If you really want, maybe we can make a book trailer for it, I mean a little movie about it on the iPhone.” I opened one of the books and stood it on the desk. “But we should take a minute to feel good about this, okay?”