Wishes and Fears
We were sitting around a long table, and the topic of conversation was the future of the novel. It felt like a safe topic, because not many people were still reading novels, let alone thinking about how they were made, or might be made differently. No one was likely to mind anything we said.
Another group, almost exactly like ours, was sitting at a similar table the next dining room over, and, from what I could hear of their conversation, they were much more likely to be a target.
The person sitting across from me wasn’t wearing a mask, and he looked approachable, so I said to him, Well, it used to be the case that there was what you know, and there was what I know, but now there’s also what the computers know, and I don’t think that’s really been put into a novel yet. For example, I said, do you know the name of the person sitting to your left, three seats away?
I didn’t move my eyes toward the person I was indicating, because I didn’t want to be rude. It can be as rude to point with your eyes as with a finger. Maybe I also didn’t want to let this person know we were talking about him. He had a nubbin-shaped head, his skin seemed to be Army green, and his face was covered by a visor. Do you know his name? I asked the person sitting across from me, who shook his head. Neither do I, I admitted, but his T-shirt says that he’s NP4, and why should we doubt that?
The person sitting across from me laughed.
They were coming now, we sensed, but it still seemed more likely that they were coming for the group at the next dining table than for us. Even though it seemed more likely that they were coming for that group, our group decided to get up and take a walk.
Why is two plus two? the person sitting across from me asked, the one who had such an open face, as we rose from our chairs.
How much time do you have? I asked in reply.
Maybe we better come back to it, the person who had been sitting across from me—who was now standing across from me—said, laughing.
But then we might never come back, I said, tapping my card against the device on the table. Often people who take a break from math never do.
That had been my own case. I had gone into novel-writing instead.
We left our coats and backpacks at our seats, because we wanted them to think we were going to be returning soon, that we were just getting some fresh air. Each of us had been given a brass water bottle, but I couldn’t find mine, and, as we filed outside, I asked my companion if he happened to have the one they had given to me.
He did have it, and he was about to hand it to me, when suddenly I distrusted it and wanted my old water bottle back, and wanted my coat and backpack, too, because after all I wasn’t actually going to be returning to the restaurant. I was going to flee.
I turned away from the group and walked back inside. There my old water bottle was, dented where I had once dropped it, its purple paint scratched by years of rattling around in its mount on my bike frame.
Was there time to refill my old water bottle? They might arrive at any moment. And maybe it was drinking my own supply of water that had kept me more vigilant than the others, that had protected me. Maybe the water in the restaurant had already been tampered with.
I looked over once more at the table in the next dining room. The group there were all still seated; they were talking unsuspectingly. An older man was touching a younger one on the forearm, but there was nothing strange about it; they both looked perfectly human.
Maybe I was mistaken in thinking that something was going to happen to them.
That’s when I realized they weren’t going to come for one table rather than another. They were at every table already. So much had already sunk beneath everyday observation.
I walked outside. If I kept moving, I told myself, I might be able to stay ahead of them for a little longer.
It was the end of the world, and a number of us had gathered in a large, abandoned house. “Normalize being in a movie where you don’t know how it ends,” I said, or somebody in the room said, because we knew we were all going to die, but not how or when. We were watching a movie and we were pretty sure we were going to die before the movie was over, but that seemed par for the course.
We were getting into the movie and starting to become a little weepy when marauders appeared on the porch. They were going from house to house, killing people and taking things (social order had broken down). It was only then that I remembered that there was a whole second apartment in the basement of the house. We should have been watching the movie there; the marauders would never even have realized we were home. Not that it would have mattered in the long run, which was just a matter of hours.
A thin teen-age boy was sitting next to me while we were watching the dying movie, and I said to him that, since there had been no mention of either of us in the movie so far, I suspected that what happened was we were both killed in an explosion and no one ever heard from us again. I considered kissing him goodbye, but we had just met, and also I wondered if he was too young to know whether he would want that.
I was in the kitchen, which had windows on three sides and a broad table in the center, and the cook was preparing Trump’s head. She was working at it with a spoon. Much was pink and dense, like a better grade of dog food, but she had to scrape out lobes that were spoiled, which had the soupy consistency of mashed potatoes that have gone bad—yellowed and oily.
It occurred to me that I should explain to her that I didn’t think I wanted to eat any.
“In that case you’re going to offend him,” the cook said. He was going to be at the dinner where his head was going to be served.
“But I’m a vegetarian,” I tried saying. “I couldn’t eat any, even if it wasn’t him.”
“Well, if you don’t eat any,” the cook warned me, “you won’t know what to do when he comes to your city.” Her logic reminded me of when Siegfried eats some of a dragon’s heart and can suddenly understand what birds are saying.
The dinner was shaping up to be one of those social situations that I never know how to get out of.
Sometimes the building is a library with marble walls and an elevator that I need to slip into when no one is watching. Sometimes it’s a dormitory that I used to live in and still have a key to even though I shouldn’t anymore.
Always, near the top of the building, there is a room no one else knows about. I get in by making use of my willingness to climb on or over things that it wouldn’t occur to most people to risk climbing, a willingness that, bit by bit, so long as I’m not observed, turns into an ability to fly. It is said that, in dreams, an ability to fly is a memory of having been held as a child, but I can really do it, if no one is watching.
For a long time I used to come to this room every day, but for some reason I haven’t in a while. The place is the worse for my neglect. White paint on the walls has gone powdery and rubs off on one of my coat sleeves when I brush against it. The mailbox is crammed so full that I have trouble getting it open. I feel terrible about the bills and the letters smashed up inside. They’ve gone unanswered so long that I wonder if it’s better to pretend that I still haven’t seen them.
I’m usually safe once inside, but it’s better if no one sees me going in or out. I don’t have any right to be in the room—there is no question of that. I’m just here to see if I can hide for a little while. To get away a little longer with the habit of hiding.
The room is the only place I become who I really am. I can’t share the secret of it, because anyone who heard about the room would instantly think of two or three people with a better right to it. I only get in by trespassing, and it will always be that way. I risk being caught, the way Thoreau was once caught revisiting a woodlot, years after he had been given permission to survey it. ♦