“I’m very serious about these evolving dangers, little brother,” Foster cautioned Andrew. He had Andrew pushed against a magazine rack. Insistence is crucial to Foster’s conversational style. Tonight he was worked up. He leaned forward, glared directly into Andrew’s face, and proclaimed, “The earth changes are coming. Everything points toward massive geophysiological change. I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll say it again. Oceans rising! Plants and mammals becoming extinct! Inner cities dying and genetic calamities of every order sauntering around like it’s Sunday in the park!”
“What are you talking about, Foster?”
“I’m talking about the coming wave of brand-new cancers spreading everywhere like the common cold during the global red tide of the immediate futures.”
“Futures?”
“Sure. The future is the aggregate of all tenable futures of individual selves,” exclaimed Foster, as if to a child. Then he declared, “You know, Andrew, I really admire the work you do with the homeless.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that.”
Now in the red library the light was diminishing; evening was falling and the winter sky outside looked ashen against the clear windowpanes overlooking the east. What time was it anyway? That glum hour before moonlit night. The cocktail hour. Why wasn’t there a fire in the hearth? Where was Spooner? Spooner always carried hooch.
“After all, aren’t we all indigent, in a metaphysical way?” Foster was saying to Andrew, intensely. Foster’s face was red and his eyes burned with belief in something larger than himself. Our Foster has at one time or another shrilly publicized the most amazing things: synchronicity, interspecial telepathy (animals read our minds), seraphic intervention (angels help us succeed in life), morphic resonance (every member of a genetically interrelated family group, no matter how widely dispersed or apparently dissimilar, will immediately comprehend or embody the changed attributes and learned abilities of one individual), Possible World Theory, Chinese astrology, and assorted ancient divinations of planetary transformation in the years after the millennium. If Foster has his way, we’ll all be abandoning our depressions in favor of united, heartfelt crusading for wide-scale spiritual reform. In this respect — this grave interest in working for causes — grandiose Foster is not unlike his more pragmatic brother Andrew, who often takes time out during family functions to pass the hat for donations to aid the residents of the flourishing tent city that has sprung up, virtually overnight it seems, in the untilled meadow beyond the garden gate, just outside our walls.