The Future for Curious People

  THE

  FUTURE FOR

  CURIOUS

  PEOPLE

  a novel by

  GREGORY SHERL

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014

  For Rebecca

  Life is a series of collisions with the future;

  it is not the sum of what we have been,

  but what we yearn to be.

  —José Ortega y Gasset

  Contents

  Evelyn

  THE BREAKUP

  Godfrey

  THE PROPOSAL

  Evelyn

  SAVING GATSBY

  Godfrey

  THE FIRST APPOINTMENT

  Evelyn

  MAYBE TRY A LITTLE BUDDHA

  Godfrey

  PLOTNIK’S DISCIPLE

  Evelyn

  BORROWERS AND THIEVES

  Godfrey

  FROG CALLS

  Evelyn

  LOUD QUIET

  Godfrey

  LET’S MAKE A DEAL

  Evelyn

  DIRTY HARRY

  Godfrey

  PLOTNIK & PLOTNIK

  Evelyn

  BEES AND BEARS

  Godfrey

  FIVE FOR THREE

  Evelyn

  A COLLABORATION

  Godfrey

  LEARNING TO ABSTRACT

  Evelyn

  THE SMELL OF HAPPY

  Godfrey

  MORNING

  Evelyn

  SWIMMING LESSONS

  Godfrey

  THE SMELL OF PETTY TYRANNY

  Evelyn

  AMNESIA

  Godfrey

  THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE

  Evelyn

  PSYCHOSIS

  Godfrey

  GODFREY IN LOVE

  Evelyn

  MRS. FUOCO

  Godfrey

  INTO THE SEA

  Evelyn

  THE DATE

  LIVE AT CLUB Q

  Evelyn

  FUTURES

  Godfrey

  NOW

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Evelyn

  THE BREAKUP

  I’m breaking up with Adrian on the corner of Charles and Mulberry where he’s passing out half-sheet advertisements for his band, the Babymakers. He’s pale and weedy-looking, permanently anxious. His cheeks are flushed, his boxy nose red. It’s cold and has just started to snow. The snow is partly the reason I’ve decided that today is the day. The air has taken shape, and everything suddenly seems like it’s in motion, full swirl.

  He shouts into the wind, “You’re breaking up with me because I’m not a successful guitarist and because I seem like I’m just a guy handing out pamphlets on a street corner! You’re disgusted.” This is why Adrian is disgusted with Adrian and has nothing to do with me. Very little of our relationship has much to do with me, which is one of the actual reasons I’m breaking up with him. He loves me but doesn’t really understand me—so, in effect, does he really love me?

  “No. Listen to me!” I circle around him, my wool coat flapping at my knees. “We both need to look forward with new eyes again.”

  “You want to look forward and see someone else. I get it.” Adrian pushes his knit hat back and scratches his forehead. “You know, it’s really superficial and judgmental of you to break up with me because I don’t meet your standards. I expected more.” This isn’t about my standards—although should I date Adrian because he meets someone else’s standards? But now Adrian has just called me superficial and judgmental. He’s not usually the type to throw stones. This attack comes off as desperate. Both kind of embarrassed for a moment, we look off in opposite directions like we’re standing at a shoreline. In some ways, his attack is so last ditch that it’s really an admission of defeat.

  “Seriously,” I say softly, “I love you.” I do love Adrian. We’ve been good to each other. There’s an undeniable accumulation of tenderness. “But . . .” I breathe into the air not wanting to say the rest. “I think we’re just holding on to something that can’t endure.” And then I whisper. “I’ve seen what’s going to become of us, and . . .”

  Adrian looks at me sharply. He knows I’m talking about having seen our future together at Dr. Chin’s office. He’d refused to come, calling all of these newfangled romantic-envisioning offices new-agey bourgeois bullshit. But in Chin’s office I saw our sad future—the two of us singing “Happy Birthday” to a Chihuahua in a Hawaiian shirt and pointy hat. “Don’t.” Adrian holds up his flexed hand; he knows I’m about to launch into the session and he hates hearing about it.

  For his sake I summarize, “We were old and tattooed and had a rusty space heater, and we sang to that dog in Spanish.” Because the dog was a Chihuahua, this last detail feels slightly racist or something. We were also wearing baffling T-shirts, which I assume will be provocative in the future: THE JUSTICE CURE? PARK IT HERE! and another outraged about moped rentals.

  Adrian says, “I just don’t believe that’s our future.” He turns away and then back again, turning a full circle. “Even if it is, how do you know we weren’t happy, deep down?”

  Here’s what I know about possible futures: They’re limitless, and all potential. They aren’t messy like the past and the present. As soon as I was wearing the paper gown and that weird helmet in Chin’s office, staring at the screen, I knew that the future seems like it has clearly marked forks in the road, but there are forks within forks within forks until each choice—whether to bring an umbrella or stop for a doughnut or break up with Adrian—is a fork. “Most people choose their futures by accident,” I say. “They don’t even know they’re making choices. They don’t even know that there are forks in the road—much less forks within forks. The future no longer has to be messy. It can be tested out. It can be known.”

  Adrian has a measure of professionalism, I’ll give him that. A swarm of commuters charges the intersection, and he’s shoving wind-flipped half sheets at their chests. “The Babymakers,” he says. “Get your ass off your sofa on Saturday night and live a little.” He goes largely ignored.

  And then there’s a lull. “Almost two years we’ve been together!” he says to me. “A total waste!”

  “It hasn’t been a waste,” I say. “Time isn’t something you put in hoping for a return on an investment. It’s experiencing life—both good and bad and occasionally tragic. It’s the tragic I’m trying to avoid.”

  “There are worse tragedies than a Chihuahua in a Hawaiian shirt, having his birthday celebrated!” Adrian says. “At least we know some Spanish in the future!”

  A woman pushing a stroller has stalled, reading the half sheet. She might want to ask a question. The baby is wearing a drawstring hood that cinches up its face, which is placid except for darting eyes. Adrian is glancing at the woman expectantly.

  “I’m trying to do what’s best,” I tell him. “I don’t want to end up two hateful old people who fight about cheese.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that I won’t fight about cheese?” During the Chihuahua’s birthday party, we squabble about whether or not melted brie is uppity.

  “The cheese is a metaphor for minutiae,” I say. “It’s just an example of how we will become bitter.”

  The woman with the stroller looks at us with some obvious pity and walks away.

  Adrian sighs and puts his hands on his skinny hips. “Are you being instigated by your mother?”

  Both of my parents seem to dislike Adrian, but at the same time, I get the feeling they think he’s too good for me, which is the kind of contradiction they’re practiced in. “My relationship with my parents is based on reading a languag
e of passive-aggressive sighing. I don’t know what they think about me—much less you.”

  “Dot doesn’t like me either.” He sighs. “She’s a weird bird.”

  My best friend, Dot, is a little odd and steals things, a nervous habit, really; she just wants me to be with someone who’s right for me. “I’m a grown-up, Adrian. Come on. I make my own decisions.”

  Adrian starts jostling between commuters again, lunging at them, one after another. I look up at the sky, growing dark. The snow is light and dizzying—and new. That’s the thing about snow. It’s all about promise. It’s nature’s do-over.

  Suddenly Adrian is standing right in front of me. He looks a little teary. Maybe it’s just the cold wind. He’s so close I feel his warm breath; this is possibly the most exercise he’s gotten in weeks. I imagine his ribs, rising and falling, after sex. I’ll miss his hands on me and the way he says I’m the best goddamn librarian in the world, even though he’s never understood what I do at the library exactly. There’s something sweet about how he loves me without knowing me—a blind love, which is almost like an unconditional love but not quite.

  He hands me a half sheet and says in his rough voice, “Get your ass off your sofa and live a little, Evelyn Shriner.” He nods, a series of jerky chin-up nods, meaning I’m saying one thing, but I mean something bigger.

  And he means I’m letting you go.

  I look at the half sheet—THE BABYMAKERS in bold letters and beneath that GET YOUR ASS OFF THE SOFA AND LIVE A LITTLE.

  I fold the flyer and put it in my coat pocket. For a split second, I try to memorize everything—the rattle of his papers, the cold shock of wind cutting the thread of my stockings, the exhaust rolling up from idling traffic, and Adrian’s wind-chapped cheeks. I’m going to lose him. I feel a pang of panic and remorse. I miss him already. I start to tear up but refuse to cry. I have to stand my ground. I hold the lapel of Adrian’s peacoat, curling my hand under the itchy wool. “Adrian,” I whisper so softly I’m not sure he can even hear me.

  “Evelyn?” he says, tilting forward like he wants something from me, something important.

  And I think of my sister—I don’t know why. She died a year and a half before I was born; I was conceived as her replacement. But what’s worse is that I never met the original. I never smelled my sister’s hair after a wash or whispered with her in a tent made of bedsheets or talked to her on the phone. I know I should be over this. There are things that grown-ups must put behind them, but here it is—a loss.

  I’ve never told Adrian about my sister, and I think of telling him now. Is this what he wants? Is it my fault that I feel like he loves me without really understanding me? Because I never confided this, he never had to rise to the occasion of what a secret, especially a sad secret, demands.

  It’s too late now, much too late.

  I say, “Tell your mom and dad to call me.” This is a segue that only makes sense in my own head; I never was the child my parents wanted, so I keep trying to create other families to slip into. Adrian’s parents still belong to a bowling league and eat popovers.

  “They’re my parents, Evelyn. I get full custody.”

  Right, of course. I’ll miss our Thanksgivings. “I’ll miss you, Adrian.”

  He touches my face gently with his fingertips and says, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” But he says it in the saddest voice possible and I love him with a flash that’s deep and unmistakable. Each person you love leaves his or her own stain, and the way you remember him is like a smell, a taste, a color—indescribable but distinct.

  I almost lean forward to kiss him, but I turn and start walking fast.

  Still, I expect him to run after me. Adrian would never run after me. Inexplicably, I put my hands in my coat pockets and both of my elbows are waiting to be the handle that Adrian will use to spin me around, and then he’ll kiss me, and say, “Don’t go.”

  This doesn’t happen. My elbows just poking out at angles, I walk on. Because Adrian is the kind of guy who lets you go, it’s best that he lets me go.

  I ball my fists in my pockets, feel the crinkle of the half sheet, and I’m saying no to one fork. I’m doubling back and choosing another forked path. And what will I find down this forked path? I don’t know, not yet.

  Godfrey

  THE PROPOSAL

  I find myself walking around the four pinched aisles of Fontana’s Super Mart and Pawn Shop twice before stopping in front of the smeary plate glass of the deli meats not far from the cash register. Mrs. Fontana is perched on a nearby stool, stuffing quarters into stiff brown paper sleeves from the bank, her fat fingers disappearing up the tubes with the resignation of a bitter proctologist. And Mr. Fontana, a narrow-headed man with blunt features, is hovering next to her, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “What can I do for you?” Mr. Fontana asks. He knows my girlfriend Madge and me but has never given the impression that he likes us. I don’t have a cart. It’s a Tuesday night in January. Aside from Mr. and Mrs. Fontana and me, the place is empty, which is normal for a Tuesday night in January. The lights flicker.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I was really just out for a walk around the block. I got cold.” Mr. Fontana looks at my mittens, the ones Madge bought me last Christmas. I already feel idiotic in them, like a four-year-old. They’re attached by some ancient device that Madge found on an antiquities website—rusty clips connected by yarn that bite the mittens, stringing them together. Wearing them is a romantic concession. Madge presented them as a joke in front of our friends at Bart and Amy’s Christmas party. Godfrey loses things—ha, ha, ha—like his wallet, like his girlfriends. I guess that’s true enough. For a year now, I’ve had a hard time keeping track of wallets, and there’d been a spate of ugly breakups just before Madge that became part of my charm. At the Christmas party, Madge grabbed my coat off a chair and laced the mittens through my sleeves. He won’t lose me, she said, and she unclipped one of the mittens, attaching it to her own sleeve, and fell drunkenly onto my lap. Madge is a weighty drunk—always hefting herself around. I often wonder where all that weight goes when she’s not drinking. When sober, she’s thin and light as balsa wood. That doesn’t sound as loving as it should. Truth is, I love Madge drunk and weighty because her face goes soft, her lips are fuller, sweeter, and I love Madge sober because her mind is quick and she looks at me sometimes like she sees some great unfinished work of art, my potential, something to live up to.

  “You using up my heat? That’s gotta be worth something to you. What are you going to buy?” Mr. Fontana says.

  I want to tell Fontana to lay off and to confess that I’m a man on the verge of proposing! Seriously, it’s a fact that a man about to propose is cuter than a basket of kittens or a squirrel Jet Skiing in an aboveground pool. (Why am I proposing now? Does it have to do with the fact that Bart and Amy—at the aforementioned Christmas party—announced the details of their envisioning session in which they are destined to be rich boat owners? Maybe that was the start of it, a wake-up call. Their announcement’s subtext seemed to say, The future is out there—and are you and Madge going to face it together?)

  I don’t know why I want the Fontanas to like me. It’s got to be a character flaw on my part. But I’m not confessing to the Fontanas. They’re both the type to make a sad joke, sour the whole thing. “Okay, okay,” I tell him. “I’ll get something.”

  I glance down at the racks—mini-flashlight key rings, ChapStick, Life Savers, Bubblicious. Sometimes it hits me that this is what the world’s made up of—the little crap that binds the seams of the universe together. Without this stuff, surely the universe would come unglued and we’d glide off in bits and parts into dark, infinite space. That’s how fragile it all seems; maybe I think of this now because what if Madge shoots me down? Only a vulnerable man would think that Bubblicious and ChapStick keep the universe glued, right?

  I pull off a mitten, letting it dangle, and put my hand in my pocket just to double-check on the velvet box. It’
s still there. It’s been sitting inside a dress sock in the back of my underwear drawer, the same spot where I used to hide my weed as a teenager.

  I pick up a pack of Certs, set them on the glass counter. Beneath the glass, there’s a variety of secondhand weapons and jewelry—the Pawn Shop part of Fontana’s—and it’s a little disconcerting how many hocked engagement rings there are on display.

  “You sure I can’t interest you in a little something more?” he says, tapping the glass. “Other people’s desperation makes for good deals.”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m good on weaponry and gems.” I pull my mitten back on.

  Mr. Fontana rings up my stuff and shoves the mints at me—no bag—rips the receipt from the register, and slides it across the counter with two double-jointed fingers.

  “Maybe you’re a winner,” Mrs. Fontana pipes up.

  This is the part that I’ve come to hate. Fontana has recently started up a Lucky Receipt promotional. One out of every ten receipts has “You’re a winner” printed on the bottom, giving you a 20 percent discount on your next food purchase—but the other nine have “You’re a loser” printed on the bottom, which has always been included with my purchases.

  I pinch the receipt through the mittens and read the faded print: You’re a loser. I look up at Fontana.

  “Well?” Mr. Fontana asks.

  “You know,” I say, still pinching the receipt, “this might not be good for business. You might want to word the loser sentiment a little more gently. Maybe something like ‘This receipt is not a winner.’ ”

  Mr. Fontana rubs his nose, a little angry gesture. “Hey, the cash register calls ’em as it sees ’em.”

  I want to reach over the counter and shove Fontana in his chest or at least make him give me a shopping bag for my package of Certs. Instead, I let it go, give him a smile, and think, Poor fucking Fontana, penned up in that shop all day with his pruned wife. But honestly it’s not comforting to pity that dickwad even though I’ve been taught that that’s the right thing to do.

  I ball up the receipt and put it in my pocket with the Certs. I walk out of the store, bell jangling, and slowly head up the sidewalk. Walking by the storefronts I catch glimpses of myself in the windows. My pants, my jacket—they already appear rumpled. I’m not sure why I rumple so quickly. My mother and father both often look rumpled. Since retirement, my father has always worn wrinkled button-downs. My mother wears wrinkly silky puffed sleeve shirts, and her mascara always daubs off with each blink, leaving little smudges around her eyes. By the end of the day, she always looks like a fatigued musketeer. They’re an exhausted rumpled pair. Maybe it’s a permanent condition: the Burkes family curse, rumpling.