“What if you could Google your own house?” Jed murmured. “If you lost your keys or TV remote you could just Google it.”
LJ’s mom looked at Jed. She walked to him. “What did you just say? Can you repeat that?” She leaned down and carefully moved her ear to Jed’s mouth.
Jed concentrated on loudness and clarity, and then repeated what he had said.
LJ’s mom stood and smiled. “Oh, Jed,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”
“Oh,” Jed said. It annoyed him that people couldn’t ever understand what he was saying. He looked around for LJ, who had wandered into the kitchen.
LJ’s mom patted Jed’s head and looked outside, through her sliding glass door. The swimming pool was covered — you couldn’t see the water — with mulch, moss, and leaves; it looked very much like a swamp, actually, had large, cage-y branches floating in it, as a tree had fallen through the screen some time ago and LJ’s mom had liked that, the idea of it, so had left it there. There was a squirrel, now, by the pool, standing motionless in that clicked-in way of the lower animals. The sun shone brightly on its handsome face. LJ’s mom stared out there, feeling a bit blighted, here inside, somehow cheated. She was thinking that if she married Jed’s dad and LJ became Jed’s girlfriend, how wonderful that would be. They’d all live together in a little house somewhere, with a shiny roof, atop some green hill. It would be in New Zealand, she thought, feeling precarious, or else Wisconsin.
Jed’s dad began to learn, that year, to enjoy waiting; there was something true and mastered about it, he knew — the casual excellence of waiting — that could induce you, lead you focusedly deathward, like a drug addiction, but without the frenzy or desperation. He felt, at times, that he could wait for anything — a month, a year, a thousand years — for love or friendship or happiness. He could exist like a theory in the place before the real place, could float there in the pigeon flight of pre-ambition, in a kind of gliding, thinking only small things and feeling only small emotions, pre-pathos, so that you could fit your entire life easily in your head, and carry it around, like a pleasant memory from some wholesome childhood, yours or someone else’s, it didn’t matter.
“LJ said Jed was being held back a year,” LJ’s mom said to Jed’s dad on the phone. Jed’s dad had liked her at first. They had gone to the movies, bowling, arcades with the kids. But over time he had seen something selfish in her, something a bit insane. She could be jealous and unreasonable. One night she had thrown a potted plant. And though he now sometimes suspected that she was a good, caring, sane person, that it was he who just hadn’t tried hard enough, who wasn’t accommodating and tolerant enough, he had stopped calling her, then, after the potted plant. But she had kept calling him.
“You shouldn’t let that happen,” LJ’s mom said. “You can’t, responsibility-wise.”
“It’s okay,” Jed’s dad said. In the elementary schools, they had begun to hold back entire ostensible playgroups of children, bunches of them, together, like something tethered and collective-brained. Jed and everyone who seemed to sit nearby this one big-headed kid, seven of them, all the foreboding, quiet kids — you could never tell if they were slow or gifted — were to repeat the fourth grade.
“It’s not okay,” LJ’s mom said. “I know Jed. Jed’s smart. You know this. They, though — they don’t know this. It’s just a misunderstanding, to be corrected.” She began to worry that Jed and LJ would drift apart if LJ advanced to the fifth grade without Jed. “What are you going to do?”
“People are different,” Jed’s dad said. “I think …” He didn’t think anything, but began to feel a little as if everything was futile.
“Have them test him. This isn’t right. I mean — repeating the fourth grade, it can do things. I knew this girl, she was held back. After that she kept getting held back. They got carried away. They pulled her all the way back to Kindergarten, then expelled her from the public school system. Her parents had to pay a series of fines to get her into pre-school.” She laughed a little. Beakers were going through her mind; a hand, calmly placing beakers onto a resplendent oak table. She didn’t know why. Probably something from TV. She had, as usual, taken a caffeine pill half-an-hour before calling Jed’s dad. “It’s strange,” she said, “how they don’t care anymore. People, I mean. Me too. All of us. We’ve no illusions anymore. People need illusions. Do you know what I’m talking about? What do you think?”
“It’s not bad,” Jed’s dad said. He hesitated these days to say anything about the world, to have any opinions or beliefs. Anything spoken was a lie, he knew — anything in the mind was a lie. What was out there was what was true. Once your mind got involved, everything turned to lies. You had just to exist, to be passive and apathetic as a dead thing in the sea, as there was a private, conspiratorial truth to just not doing anything, a kind of coming-to-terms, a loneliness turned contentment, a sort of friendliness towards oneself. Or was there? When was something completely made up and when was something only a little made up? Jed’s dad knew never to trust himself. Think too hard, he knew, and you found that there was no point in saying, thinking, or doing anything.
“It is, though,” LJ’s mom said. “It’s bad. You know it. No one’s planning for the long-term anymore. The generation before us, they said things. They said …” She couldn’t think of anything. “They said a lot of things. Now the Earth is — let’s face it — doomed. I saw on TV, they’re rethinking one of the smaller continents as a garbage dump, reinterpreting it, they said. I mean, wow. And what are they doing with the moon? Shouldn’t we be living on the moon in those space domes by now? Scouting the outer planets? I mean, what year is this? What is the government doing these days? NASA, whatever?” She thought briefly about the Ort Cloud — it was coming, but what was it? “Why don’t you come over?” she said. “I’ll make food. I have new recipes. I’ll cook.” She wanted to talk, just wanted to keep on talking, for hours, forever, wanted to argue and discuss things, any kind of thing, as she couldn’t talk to anyone like this, only to kids, and to Jed’s dad — with other people she just felt alone in the world and nauseated — but he wasn’t saying anything.
“Next week then,” LJ’s mom said. “Saturday. Saturday, okay? Jed and everyone.”
“Okay,” Jed’s dad said. “We’ll see.”
They were in their late twenties, had both married young, to early girl and boyfriends, were both aware of the basic eschatology of things, though in different ways. Jed’s dad could sense the end of life as a place you got to, someplace far away and separate, like Hawaii; could sometimes see it, that it was a nice place, with trees, a king-size bed. LJ’s mom couldn’t sense that place. Hers was the view — the experience — that every moment was a little death, that you were never really alive, because you were always dying. And in this way she sensed, instead, everything swirling around her, felt the slow-fast blur of each moment, the raking of it, the future grinding through her, to the past, and crashing, at times, like a truck, through her skull. Sometimes, walking around the house or doing whatever, she would suddenly feel smashed in the head, with sadness or disbelief or some other disorienting method. Days would go by, then, weeks or months, before she recovered.