10:04: A Novel

FIVE

“The quality of the photographs is implausibly high,” I said, “and there aren’t any stars.”

“The angle and shadows are inconsistent, suggesting the use of artificial light,” she quoted, eyes beginning to shine.

In college, Alex had dated a humorless astrophysics major, now the youngest full professor of something at MIT; after a few months of growing intimacy, she’d felt obliged to introduce us. The three of us met for dinner at a Cambodian restaurant not far from campus where, slamming can after can of Angkor, I insisted the Apollo moon landing had been faked. I was so persistent, he believed I was at least half serious and it drove him insane. Long after it had ceased to be funny, and after Alex had repeatedly tried to change the subject, I was still passionately identifying supposed inconsistencies in the images and astronauts’ reports. (I was familiar with the arguments of disbelievers from a paper I’d written about conspiracy theories for a psychology course.) The scientist couldn’t stand me, was clearly baffled by how Alex could consider me her best friend; she was furious, dodged calls from me for days.

Now we were sitting side by side on a lawn swing in the middle of an expansive, unkempt backyard in New Paltz, and, having indicated the gibbous moon visible in the daytime sky above us, I was again listing the reasons why I “believed” the landing was a hoax. Over the years this had become one of our ritual ways of affirming the priority of our relationship over other modes of coupling — half inside joke, half catechism. My arm was around her, and the cancer had spread to her mother’s spine.

“There appear to be ‘hot spots’ in some photos indicating that a large spotlight was used.”

“You can see the spotlight when Aldrin emerges from the lander.”

“And why would they fake it?” her emaciated mother asked, laughing. Now it was night and we were sitting in the screened-in porch, Alex’s stepfather in the kitchen preparing a bland meal rich in bioflavonoids while the three of us smoked some of the marijuana I’d brought at her mom’s request, her doctor’s off-the-record suggestion. With what I thought of as my advance, I’d purchased from a head shop on Saint Mark’s what Jon described as the “Rolls-Royce of vaporizers”; there would be no carcinogenic particulates to irritate her throat. We passed a small balloon filled with the vapor back and forth between our wicker chairs. The head scarf she wore was gold; the otherwise tasteless vapor had a note of mint.

“Are you kidding, Emma?” I asked with mock incredulity, intensity. “Cold War space race? Kennedy talking about the ‘final frontier’?”

“The ‘final frontier’ is a phrase from Star Trek,” Alex corrected me.

“Whatever,” I said. “The moon landings stop suddenly in 1972. The same year the Soviets develop the capacity to track deep spacecraft. Or to discover we had no spacecraft deep in space.”

“That’s around the end of official military involvement in Vietnam,” Alex’s stepdad said, as he brought in a tray of sliced vegetables and hummus. “Televised landings could have been an attempt to distract Americans from the war.”

“That’s good thinking, Rick,” Emma and Alex both laughing at my mock professorial tone. Rick sat, opened a beer, ate a slice of yellow pepper, then stood up and returned to the kitchen, forgetting the beer; he couldn’t sit still for half a minute. Soon Alex followed him in.

“Not to mention NASA having an interest in securing funding,” I said, but knew the joking was over. Emma chuckled politely in the changed air. I had to fight back my tendency to fill the ensuing silence. A minute or so later:

“So we don’t know how long this is going to take,” she said, and by “this” she meant dying. I swallowed the cliché about none of us knowing how much time we had, and said:

“We’ll be with you. Every step of the way.” She looked at me steadily; I felt thanked.

“It’s not any of my business,” she said after a while, “but I don’t want you two to — how should I put this. I’m a little worried — I’m worried you and Alex might be rushing into all of that because of this,” where “that” meant procreation.

“She’s wanted a kid for a long time,” I said, but thought of my dad’s brief and ill-conceived marriage to Rachel.

“She’s wanted it and not wanted it. She’s had plenty of opportunities, men who would have settled down. Or at least wanted kids. There was Joseph—”

I made a noise that belittled Joseph.

“They were a good match in a lot of ways. I think it’s stuff around her own dad, as I’ve told her. She can’t decide if she wants her kid to have a father.” I felt my presence flicker. “I just want to make sure you guys know what you’re doing.” We didn’t, but we’d scheduled new IUIs, the next one in a few days. They believed that they could effectively wash and scrub my sperm. If they can put a man on the moon, I joked to myself, and said:

“Maybe this”—a pause—“is a fine reason.” I had thoughts about why, but just let the statement sit there. She considered it for a while.

“Maybe it is.”

Maybe it was. The hot tub had been installed in the basement where we were staying as part of a regime of hydrotherapy intended to help with the pain, but her mom never used it. Perhaps we erroneously assumed water would aid lubrication; maybe we thought it described the future we were inheriting or would obscure the boundaries of our bodies in a way that would diminish the bizarreness; but water, as we should have known, washes away natural lubricants, and silicone substitutes, even if we’d had one on hand, aren’t recommended for couples trying to conceive.

It was probably all shot on a soundstage in L.A. Or the desert, slow-motion photography simulating zero gravity.

Not that we were a couple. We withdrew from the tub into the next room, where earlier that day Rick had made up the foldout sofa bed. By the time we reached it, however, I was no longer physiologically prepared. For whatever complex of reasons, I stopped her from initiating oral stimulation and kissed her with a passion I did not feel, but which rose within me as I faked it; soon, to my relief and frankly my surprise, I was capable of going on.

Lubrication, however, still posed a problem, a problem compounded by our being under the impression, possibly erroneous, that cunnilingus can imperil conception, saliva interfering with sperm transport. Thus we relied on manual stimulation in which she assisted and, aided by whatever she was imagining behind closed eyes, eventually we were able to proceed. When I was on top of her, she opened them, dark epithelium and clear stroma, and said, no doubt trying to encourage us both, “Fuck me.” But the unmistakable affectation in the voice of the least affected person I knew caused me to smile: then we both started laughing, producing what felt like instant flaccidity. I rolled off her and we lay there together on our backs. There are identical soil formations in photos that, according to their captions, were taken miles apart.

We inhaled some more weed from the vaporizer I’d left plugged in by the wall — although who knew what that was doing to my sperm — and eventually she attempted to restart things; this time I didn’t stop her. I stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of her mother two stories above me; wasn’t this also detrimental to conception? Abetted by the image of the redheaded Marfan from the party, we were soon able to resume. She climbed on top of me. Before I could take in the view of her strong body, she pressed the heel of her palm hard into my chin and, perhaps wanting to avoid my face or gaze, pushed my head back so that my eyes were directed toward the wall behind me; I bit my tongue, mint aftertaste of vapor mixing with the ferric taste of blood.

Experts, however, discourage positions in which sperm has to compete with gravity, and so now we were lying on our sides. I was behind her, trying to figure out what to do with my hands, which felt a little numb. I was somehow too shy to reach for her breasts or genitalia as my instincts bade me, even though we were conjoined. Finally I asked her where she’d like me to place them with a polite formality so incongruous with our situation that it again caused us to laugh. But we were determined not to let hilarity derail us a second time. She turned around and faced me frankly, scissoring her legs through mine. I pulled her hair back so that her neck was exposed, pressed my face into it, and, after many months of trying, came.

Her mom’s cells were dividing uncontrollably above us. The oceans, like Judd’s boxes, expanded as they warmed. Do you know what I mean if I say that what was most powerful about the experience was how it changed nothing? The flag seems to flutter in the wind, but there’s no air on the moon. The child-Alex was sleeping in the room beside her mom’s, green plastic stars glowing on the ceiling, her breathing synchronized with the thirty-six-year-old beside me. That our relationship had not been perceptibly deepened by the event was powerful evidence of the relationship’s depth. Only that made things a little different.

After I don’t know how long I floated up the carpeted stairs to get a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge; I tiptoed even though there was no way I could have woken anyone. I was heading back down with the green glass bottle when I sensed a presence on the screened-in porch, turned my head, and saw the glow of an LED screen; it was Rick. He’d no doubt seen me; I felt I should say hello, and joined him.

“What are you reading?” I asked, sitting in a wicker chair.

“Nothing. I’m addicted to these message boards. Johns Hopkins. Mayo Clinic.” He turned it off and we were in the dark. “It’s useless. A community of desperate spouses.”

“How are you doing,” I said, “all things considered?”

“Fine as long as there’s some immediate task at hand,” he said. “But it’s horrible at night.”

It might have been too dark to see me nod, but I nodded.

“What I can’t stop thinking about — and I know this is crazy — I can’t stop thinking about Ashley,” he said.

“That makes sense,” I said. “It doesn’t sound crazy.”

“But I keep waiting for Emma to say to me, ‘I want to tell you something, but I want you to promise you won’t be mad.’”

“To confess that she’s faking.”

“Yeah. And it’s like — sometimes if I haven’t been sleeping, if it’s like four in the morning, I start to think to myself: she could be faking, I start to suspect. It’s hard to explain: I know it’s crazy, impossible, I don’t really believe it, but it’s like this embodied memory of Ashley. Of what it felt like when that reality began to dawn on me.”

“Of course you wish it were fake. I understand that.”

“But it’s more complicated than that, see. I imagine her telling me, my realizing it’s all a hoax. But it’s not like I imagine relief. What I imagine is trashing the house in a rage, leaving her, never seeing her again. If I were to learn she was faking her death, she’d be dead to me.”

I wondered if I could put Rick’s story about Ashley in a novel, if he’d feel betrayed.

“And by the way, then I find myself thinking, even though I know it’s preposterous: What if Ashley wasn’t faking? What if she lied about lying in order to release me?”

Two days later I was in another woman’s arms: with one she cradled me and with the other she ran a sonographic wand, its end anointed with a cool, colorless gel, over my chest in search of a clear image. My eyes were shut and hers were focused on the screen where my black-and-white heart was pretending to beat. Every few minutes she’d ask me to change positions, my paper gown crackling against the paper sheet, or to hold my breath, which aids the imaging. The sonographer was around my age, Dominican I guessed, gentler and much more intimate than the last one; behind closed eyes, I kept imagining her as Alex. One moment you are inhaling cannabis vapor in a finished basement in New Paltz awkwardly attempting to impregnate your best friend, and the next a lubricated transducer is emitting waves of sound into your chest. I felt pregnant: there’s no difference between this procedure and fetal echocardiography, save for placement. I pictured my heart as embryonic, except growth at the sinuses could mean death.

In the month or so since my return from Marfa I had presented a range of symptoms Andrews assured me were almost certainly psychosomatic responses to the upcoming test: headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness in my face and hands. I feared the test more than dissection because I feared the surgery more than death. So clearly could I picture the cardiologist walking in to inform me that the speed of dilation required immediate intervention that it was as though it had already happened; predicting it felt like recalling a traumatic event.

She pressed the wand hard into my ribs; I started. “Sorry, sweetheart, we’re almost finished,” she said, addressing a child within me. A few minutes later: “Okay, the doctor is going to want to review this,” and she left the room. Why was she in such a hurry to fetch him?

Never forget that you can put your clothes back on and leave the institution before the doctor arrives to read your future in your organs, the modern haruspicy that exorbitant insurance barely covers. You can say it’s all a hoax and walk out into the unseasonable warmth and take your chances with an asymptomatic idiopathic condition incidentally discovered. Whether cowardly or courageous, that’s a choice, and I was tempted on my plastic table. A few millimeters of growth and they’d open me up with what I imagined as a straight razor. I looked at the screen, which had a frozen image of my heart and arteries, and, in the upper right hand corner, saw the flashing numbers: 4.77 cm; 5.2 cm. Cold spread through me; if either were a measure of aortic diameter, I’d be in surgery within days.

I did walk out, but only to get Alex from the waiting room. She followed me back in and I told her I thought it was bad news, had seen these numbers. She hushed me and we waited; a screensaver took over the monitor: WASHING HANDS SAVES LIVES scrolled across the black in red. The real-time lunar communications lacked a sufficient delay; nobody had ever left the earth except to enter it.

He entered smiling. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a purple tie under the white coat. He shook our hands and said, “Let’s take a look.” An endless minute later: “Everything looks okay. You’re showing 4.3.”

“But the MRI said 4.2,” Alex said before I could, her notebook open on her lap. One millimeter in that period of time could indicate imminent surgery.

“The echo has a wide margin of error. Those are equal values.”

“How can 4.2 and 4.3 be equal values?” I asked, relieved he had said there’d been no change, scared because the numbers expressed one.

“What we can see here is that there hasn’t been change beyond the margin of error of the echocardiograph and we’ll watch you closely as it progresses. If it progresses.” I wasn’t happy that if was an afterthought. “Understand it is most likely not changing that rapidly.”

“But what if it’s already changed a millimeter?” I asked.

“Then it will continue to change and we’ll get it on the next test.”

“So 4.3 might mean more than 4.3, might mean 4.3, might mean 4.2,” Alex confirmed.

“Yes.”

“So we’ve learned nothing except that it isn’t ballooning?” I sounded angry, felt nothing.

“We have demonstrated some minimum of stability,” he said. Then, when we didn’t say anything: “This is good news.”

“This is good news,” Alex confirmed. He shook our hands and left to help patients with less virtual conditions.

Two days later at NewYork-Presbyterian I masturbated before Amateur All Stars 3 into a specimen cup. They washed and placed my suspect sperm in Alex and then the two of us walked across the park to Telepan for her birthday dinner. She was thirty-seven. The author was 4.2 or 4.3. They’d given her mom months. We had Nantucket Bay scallops at market price on the strength of my advance. We would supplement IUIs with coitus during the period of ovulation or vice versa, both to maximize our chances and, although neither of us said it, because we could then narrate conception, if it occurred, as at least potentially independent of the institution.

Two days later I was ending or at least suspending my sexual relationship with Alena because Alex could not for a complex of reasons reconcile our intermittent intercourse with my having another active partner. We were at a basement bar in Chinatown that felt, but was not, candlelit, an effect of paper shades. I explained that I needed to break it off to prioritize my unromantic sexual friendship even though these relationships were not, save for this hopefully brief period of trying to conceive, mutually exclusive. I knew she would be angry.

But she wasn’t angry. “Are you sure you’re not upset?”

“Not at all.”

“Hurt?”

“No.”

“Jealous?”

“Jealous of your having scheduled sex with a friend before visits to a clinic?”

“Not even wistful or something?”

“I never really know what wistful means, exactly.”

“I mean like melancholy longing. Nostalgic.”

“You want me to be nostalgic already?”

“You could anticipate nostalgia.”

“I could long to be nostalgic. Yearn for the time when I will yearn for the past.”

“I’m glad you’re not unhappy.” I was unhappy.

“And then in the future I can yearn for the past when I yearned for the future when I would yearn for the past.”

“Okay, I’m glad you understand.”

“Totally. By the way, I’ve barely seen you in eight or nine weeks. Our relationship was already on hiatus.” Somehow it had never occurred to me that this conversation was perfectly unnecessary. Suddenly, instead of trying to let her go, I felt like I was trying to get her back.

“When she gets pregnant or I quit helping her, maybe we can — check in.”

“Let’s be sure to check in.” She laughed. “But this doesn’t get you out of writing the catalogue essay.” She had a big show coming up at a Chelsea gallery.

Several sidecars later we were saying something like a real goodbye. We were near the D stop on Grand Street, nobody out except the rats. She was meeting someone uptown and I was going home. It felt like her nails might break the skin on the back of my neck. It was the sexiest kiss in the history of independent film. I felt horrible descending the steps to the downtown platform because I knew I’d hardly ever see her again.

But when I walked onto the platform, there she was, waiting across the tracks for the uptown train. One or two other people waited far down the platform, a man in a hooded sweatshirt was passed out or had passed away on one of the wooden seats, but otherwise we were alone, having just said our passionate farewell, staring at each other’s ghost in the quiet tunnel. You know the embarrassing experience of saying goodbye to someone only to learn they’re walking in your direction, meaning the social exchange has to extend beyond its ritual closure, at which point there are no established mores to guide you? I’d ended things aboveground only to resume them below it, electrified rails charging the distance between us. She stared at me calmly and — involuntarily, idiotically, awkwardly — I waved and walked farther down the platform.

But wait: I had supplanted the closure of that kiss with a clumsy half wave that would resonate back through and color her memory of me; that couldn’t stand. I walked back toward her but now she was facing the tile wall, scanning a movie poster. I called her name not knowing what I planned to say and, to my surprise and confusion, she wouldn’t turn around; no way she couldn’t hear me unless there were earbuds I couldn’t see. Was she crying and didn’t want me to know? Was she angry? Was she expressing indifference or smoldering intensity? I could see the yellow light of a train deep in the tunnel to my left, rails beginning to shine as it approached. I sprinted up the stairs and down the uptown side; as the train roared into the station across the platform, I reached her, which meant it never happened, waking the next morning in the Institute for Totaled Art.

* * *

Dear Ben, I deleted, Thank you for your kind invitation to contribute work to the first issue of your journal and for enclosing a poem of your own. Did Bronk even have e-mail? Probably not. He died in 1999. There are advantages in being a neglected writer but one doesn’t want to enjoy them entirely without relief, I had paraphrased from a letter he sent to Charles Olson in the early sixties, and so you were kind to write. I am afraid I do not have any poems to send. Your letter prompted me to look over the notes I do have and trying to read my most recent effort I became aware how much tolerance and prepossession reading me at all requires. Does it please you to know how much I value your description of my poems, your appreciation of “Midsummer” especially, and the fact that they were given to you by Bernard, to whom I hope you will send my warm regards? It is good to know where one’s friends are in dark times. That last line didn’t sound like him at all.

Natali had mailed the copy of Bronk’s selected poems that I’d brought to the hospital back to me when Bernard was transferred to a rehab facility in Providence. It had a kind of aura now; in the margins were my illegible undergraduate notes and imitations in pencil, in addition to a series of coffee stains, small traces from a previous self in love with the nonexistent daughter of the couple to whom I’d eventually brought the volume as a kind of offering; now all those distances, real and fictive, were reflected in Bronk’s poetry, as though in some impossible mirror. I deleted:

I don’t know if I know how to read the poem of yours that you enclosed. Understand I am easily baffled. I remember when Cid Corman was printing my work in Origin, the magazine you mention as a kind of inspiration. Well, every time I saw the magazine I wondered who in the hell these people were and what in the name of God they were talking about. Except maybe Creeley. I would receive books with cordial letters from other contributors but I didn’t care anything about their books and I told them so which at the time I thought a coarse necessity. I was reacting to what I saw as the logrolling and mutual back scratching and pretending to like each other that made poetry like any other industry. One should not — no rather cannot as a practical matter — expect one poet often to genuinely like the work of another — not a contemporary’s. Even when we think we are writing to one another we are not writing for one another and so incomprehension is probably a necessity. We poets are not, as Oppen would say, coeval with each other, let alone our readers. It’s in this sense the “public” is right to think of poets as anachronisms. It’s one reason among others that I could never edit a magazine.

I looked around the apartment, thinking how, if I weren’t abandoning these letters, I might insert some physical particulars into them. I love how in Keats’s letters, for instance, he’s always describing his bodily position at the time of writing, the conditions of his room: “The fire is at its last click — I am sitting here with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated upon the carpet,” for instance. But what I perceived — rain on the skylight, a pigeon cooing beside the idle AC window unit, the smell of cilantro from downstairs, weak yellow of the cactus flower on the sill, beta-blocker beside my glass of water — I couldn’t see ascribing to Bronk in his large house in Hudson Falls.

I highlighted the rest of the letter in blue and hit delete. Somehow destroying the fabricated correspondence made it seem real; how many authors have burned their letters? Abandoning the book about forging my archive left me feeling as though I actually possessed one, as though I were protecting my past from the exposure of publication. Al Jazeera was streaming in a separate window: “Given the gutted institutions,” somebody said, “a true transition could take years.” Sirens in the distance. I tapped and then banged on the actual window to try to dislodge the stout-bodied passerine — I always felt like I was interacting with the same bird no matter where I encountered it in the city — but it only preened and repositioned itself a little. (I just Googled pigeon and learned they aren’t true passerines; along with doves, they constitute the distinct bird clade Columbidae.) “Now we turn to weather developments in the Caribbean.” After a while I left for campus to meet a student.

An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York; it was still a few days away off the coast of Nicaragua. Soon the mayor would divide the city into zones, mandate evacuations from the lower-lying ones, and shut down the entire subway system. For the second time in a year, we were facing once-in-a-generation weather. Outside it was still just unseasonably warm, but there was a sense of imminent, man-made excitation in the air. “Here we go again,” a neighbor said to me, smiling, when he passed me on the street; he only seemed to acknowledge my presence when our world was threatening to end.

I was still on leave, but I kept in touch with graduate students whose manuscripts I was informally advising and two or three undergraduates who were working on honors theses of naïve ambition; otherwise I was making myself as scarce as possible. But I had to fill out some forms to fix my tax withholding in Human Resources anyway, so I decided to make a rare appearance on campus and meet one of the graduate poets, Calvin, in my office.

In the last few months, Calvin’s messages to me had become both more frequent and harder to parse. Instead of sending me revisions of poems or comments about the readings I’d suggested, his rambling e-mails had begun to include long passages about “the poetics of civilizational collapse” and “the radical eschatological horizon of revolutionary praxis.” Then they would switch suddenly back into a more mundane register as he complained quite sanely about tuition and fees and his sense that graduate school wasn’t making him a better writer. He also expressed a great deal of concern about my health, despite my having already insisted it was fine, because he’d read the story in The New Yorker.

I took the 2 to Flatbush, accepting, as I left the station, some glossy apocalyptic literature from an elderly Jehovah’s Witness. There was more security at the front gate than usual and when I walked onto the lawn I realized there was an Occupy-style protest, a large circle in front of the hall where my office was housed. When I joined the group, however, I realized it wasn’t a protest, but rather an organizational meeting preparing for hurricane relief. I was impressed with how smoothly the leaderless meeting was run; by the time I broke off from the group to meet Calvin in my office, I’d volunteered to serve as a liaison between the campus and the co-op, helping them coordinate food drives; it was just a question of e-mail introductions. One of the most vocal students in the circle, Makada, had been in my undergraduate seminar the year before; I took a totally unjustified pride in her acumen and poise, which made me feel avuncular and old.

I felt that something was seriously wrong with Calvin as soon as I saw him sitting on the floor before my locked and dark office door, his back against it, a book open in his lap, but his eyes staring blankly at the opposite wall, his earbuds blasting something, but there was nothing unusual about encountering a student thus. When I greeted him and moved to unlock the door, there was a strange mixture of urgency and slowness of response, as if he had to keep reminding himself to react to external stimuli, but then reacted violently.

When I finally found the correct key and opened the door I was surprised by a sudden blast of wind, a few papers swirling in it. The large window facing the lawn was open some ten inches, had perhaps been that way for many months, although the computer and desk would prove to be dry, undamaged. As I took in my office from the doorway, I felt I was looking into the office of a dead man — a mildly musty smell, despite the open window; the disarranged papers, a leftover plastic Starbucks cup that had once held iced coffee, a small plastic bag of almonds, an open copy of the Cantos facedown on the desk: it felt like somebody had planned to be right back and never returned, dissected. I picked up the papers and hastily organized the desk, then turned on my computer, reassured by the Apple start-up chime, F-sharp major chord, a registered trademark.

My desk faced the wall; I swiveled around in my chair so I was facing Calvin in his; although we’d often sat in these positions before, he kept looking either at the screen or the window behind me with such fixed intensity that I couldn’t help but turn around to see what he was seeing (nothing). I asked him how he was.

“I’ve been good, I’ve been good,” he said.

I asked what he’d been doing, how his work was coming.

“It’s been amazing, amazing.” He was bouncing his right leg up and down rapidly, a habit I had, but which in him alarmed me. I suspected his energy had its origin in prescription amphetamines, which I had used, before my aortic diagnosis, semirecreationally.

“Did you read the O’Brien poems?”

“Man, I have been reading everything. Have been reading and not sleeping.” Adderall. Or, paradoxically, withdrawal from Adderall. He put a piece of gum in his mouth, and offered me some, which I accepted.

“What did you think of Metropole?” It was the O’Brien book we were due to discuss.

“You know how those poems just spider out, how those poems just spider out on the page?”

“Go on,” I said, unfamiliar with the phrase, which made me uneasy.

“How they can move in any direction, how you can read one line a thousand different ways, the syntax shifts as you go.” This was true, was often true of poems, but was particularly true of O’Brien’s work. I was relieved by the comment’s applicability, since I feared Calvin and I were in distinct universes. I said some things about the form of Metropole I thought he might find useful, and he took notes, head bent over a legal pad. But when I stopped talking, he kept writing.

“So has reading Metropole made you think any more about the prose poems at the center of your manuscript, how you might strategically disrupt your sentences, for instance?”

And writing.

“Calvin?” Finally he looked up from the paper and met my eyes. His were hazel, shining, although the shine I probably imagined. I felt a manic energy of my own, as if I’d had too much coffee.

“Do you see this?” he said, holding the pad up to me, which was now largely covered in a kind of microscript.

“You have bad handwriting,” I said.

“How the materiality of the writing destroys its sense, like we talked about in class. You start by writing and then you’re drawing. Or you start by reading and then you’re looking. Poetics of modal instability. Pushed past the point of collapse.”

I recommended a famous essay about the visual components of writing, in an attempt to reassimilate Calvin’s frightening energy to the academic. I swiveled around to the computer and searched an academic database to get the full citation. When I turned back around he was looking out the window the way Joan of Arc looks out of the painting. Was he being called?

“What kind of gum is this?” I asked.

It took him a while to look at me. He smiled. “Nicotine gum.” That’s why I was a little nauseated. It was strong. I didn’t spit it out: it was one of the few things connecting us.

“Are you quitting?”

“No, but my mom bought me a ton of this at Christmas.”

“How is stuff going beyond poetry?” I felt I could ask, after the mention of family.

“Well, you said once that we shouldn’t worry about our literary careers, should worry about being underwater.” I must have been joking around in class — half joking. “And in any new civilization you need those who have a sense of usable history and can reconstruct at least the basic concepts from science. Also there is the literalization of all literature because the sky is falling, if you know what I mean — that’s no longer just a phrase. A lot of people can’t handle it, how everything becomes hieroglyphic. I lost my girlfriend over that. Body without organs, for instance. I can swallow but there is a cost to swallowing in the sense that I don’t have the same kind of throat. That’s a metaphor but it has real effects, which is what she couldn’t understand. What’s tricky is you want to test it, take poison or whatever to show how you can absorb it, but you don’t know in that instance if it will be symbolic or spider out.”

The college did not have good psychiatric services. He was twenty-six; no one could force him to get help or even legally contact his parents, whoever they were.

“Nobody thinks we’ve been told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you’re buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this”—here he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow’s peak; I wasn’t sure—“that wasn’t there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, can feel that when it clicks, but I can’t afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names before they form. The World Meteorological Organization’s Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee — I looked it up. And ever since I looked it up I can’t get service on my phone. Every call is just dropped.”

“I agree it’s a crazy time,” I said. “But I think in times like these we have to try to stay connected to people. And we have to try to make our own days, despite all the chaos. We have to focus on feeling comfortable in our own skin, and we need to be open to getting help with that.” I was desperately trying to channel my parents.

“Exactly. And the skin is where a lot of the information is entering now. The pores. The pores are the poets of the skin. Who said that? And people try to seal them, silence them. I guess I did. My girlfriend would seal the pores on her face with egg whites and other shit and she’d have no idea where that was coming from, even if the companies say all natural or organic. Why do you think they sell so much makeup at airports? They don’t need to test them on animals; they have supercomputers that can basically feel pain at this point. It’s like molecular caulking but you’re not going to keep particles out that way and you’re just shutting yourself off from the social. From what’s coming.”

“Calvin”—I spoke slowly—“a lot of the things you’re saying aren’t really making sense to me.” Was that true? “I get the feeling you’ve been really stressed. This is a stressful place, a stressful time. Sounds like you’re going through a breakup. I often feel really worn out when I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to write.” He looked at me with hurt surprise. “I’m wondering if you’re seeing anyone or maybe could consider seeing somebody. Just to talk through things.”

“Okay, wow. Wow. You want to pathologize me, too. I guess that’s your job. You represent the institution. The institution speaks through you. But let me ask you something”—I sized Calvin up physically; he was taller than I was, nearly as tall as the protester, but thin, almost lanky; I involuntarily visualized punching him in the throat if he attacked me—“can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there’s poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man-made, even if they’re now out of the government’s control? You don’t think the FBI is fucking with our phones? The language is just becoming marks, drawings of words, not words — you should know that as well as anybody. Or are you on drugs? Are you letting them regulate you?” He stood up so suddenly I flinched, then felt bad for flinching. “Sorry for wasting your time,” he said, maybe holding back tears, and stormed out of my office, forgetting his legal pad.

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?”

We sat there smiling anxiously at one another, our masterpiece between us. Roberto nodded, but didn’t speak. The room had that particular quality of silence that obtains when many loud bodies have recently left. I could hear kids laughing and shrieking on the street below as they were handed off to relatives and guardians; I thought I could detect an added hint of desperation, as if the children had registered a precipitous change in atmospheric pressure. I could hear Chancho, the class’s hamster, scurrying around in the cage against the wall behind me, imagined Daniel was refilling its water bottle, resisted the temptation to turn around. In the distance: a jackhammer, airplane noise, the bell of a pushcart vendor selling nieves. A car blasting cumbia stopped at the nearest corner; the music receded once the light turned green.