10:04: A Novel

TO THE FUTURE by Roberto Ortiz

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THE MISTAKE

II. THE CORRECTION

III. THE TRUE DINOSAUR

CONCLUSION: SCIENCE ON THE MOVE

CHAPTER ONE: THE MISTAKE

Othniel Marsh was the paleontologist who in 1877 discovered a dinosaur called the apatosaurus. “apatosaurus” means “deceptive lizard.” This is a funny name since Marsh himself would be deceived about the “apatosaurus.”

In 1879 Marsh thought he had found another species of dinosaur. In fact, he had found more apatosaurus bones but no head. He found a head that he thought belonged to a new dinosaur, but really it was the skull of a camarasaurus. He named this fake dinosaur brontosaurus! “Brontosaurus” means “thunder lizard” in Greek.

CHAPTER TWO: THE CORRECTION

In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn’t know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels — and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn’t know.

This stamp shows how popular the brontosaurus was. Even in 1989, when this stamp was made, which was 86 years after scientists discovered the brontosaurus didn’t exist, people were still using the name “brontosaurus” and imagining that dinosaur.

CHAPTER THREE: THE TRUE DINOSAUR

The apatosaurus lived in the Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. The apatosaurus was one of the biggest animals that ever lived. It weighed more than 30 tons, was up to 90 feet long, and could be 15 feet tall at the hips. Its head was less than two feet long, which is small for such a big body. It had a long skull and a tiny brain. Its teeth were thin, like pencils. Its tail was up to fifty feet long. The apatosaurus was an herbivore, which means it ate only plants. It ate stones that helped it grind up and digest the plants.

One strange fact about the apatosaurus is that its nostrils were located on top of its head. Scientists don’t know why. At first they thought this maybe helped the apatosaurus breathe in water, but since apatosaurus fossils have been found far away from any bodies of water, scientists no longer think this is true. It remains a mystery.

CONCLUSION: SCIENCE ON THE MOVE

The story of the apatosaurus shows how science always changes. It shows this because first Othniel Marsh discovered a dinosaur called the apatosaurus. Later he thought he found a new species of dinosaur. But it was just an apatosaurus with a different head. Then this false dinosaur got famous. Scientists corrected their mistake, but many museum labels didn’t. People still think there is a dinosaur called the brontosaurus.

Scientists are learning that every day there is something new to discover. Many new discoveries change our thoughts about the past. So science is infinite and goes on forever. Science is always on the move with its face to the future.

THE END

* * *

Again we did the things one does: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights, drew the bath. Then we got into bed and projected Back to the Future onto the wall; it could be our tradition for once-in-a-generation weather, I’d suggested to Alex, the way some families watch the same movie every Christmas, except we weren’t a family. Branches scraped against the windows, casting their shadows in the 1980s, the 1950s; a couple of plastic trash cans were blown down the street, and rain hit the skylight hard enough that it sounded like hail. By the time the storm made landfall, Marty was teaching Chuck Berry how to play rock and roll in the past, which meant that, when he got back to the future, white people would have invented, not appropriated, that musical form; I spent a few minutes describing this ideological mechanism to Alex before I realized she was asleep. I drifted off too, and when I woke, I walked to the window; it was still raining hard, but the yellow of the streetlamps revealed a mundane scene; a few large branches had fallen, but no trees. We never lost power. Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.

Except it had arrived, just not for us. Subway and traffic tunnels in lower Manhattan had filled with water, drowning who knows how many rats; I couldn’t help imagining their screams. Power and water were knocked out below Thirty-ninth Street and in Red Hook, Coney Island, the Rockaways, much of Staten Island. Hospitals were being evacuated after backup generators failed; newborn babies and patients recovering from heart surgery were carried gingerly down flights of stairs and placed in ambulances that rushed them uptown, where the storm had never happened. Houses up and down the coast had been obliterated, flooded, soon a neighborhood in Queens would burn. Emergency workers were fishing out the bodies of those who had drowned during the surge; who knew how many of the homeless had perished? Scores of Chelsea galleries had been inundated and soon the insurers would be welcoming the newly totaled art into their vast warehouses. Alena’s work wasn’t on a ground floor, I remembered; besides, she strategically damaged her paintings in advance; they were storm-proof.

The next day we went to the co-op and bought food to donate — there was a relay set up between the co-op and the Rockaways, in part facilitated by “my” students. We talked constantly about the urgency of the situation, but were still unable to feel it, as the festive atmosphere in the higher-elevation areas of Brooklyn recalled a snow day: parents and kids staying home from work and school, playing in the park; the only visible damage within six blocks of us was a large tree that had crushed an empty car. There were no shortages of food or water in the local stores; the restaurants were full. Everyone we knew was okay; our friends in lower Manhattan had evacuated or, like Alena, were camping out with sufficient supplies. Friends of Alex’s had an apartment flooded with the infinitely filthy water of the Gowanus Canal, but, within our immediate community, that was the upper limit of destruction.

On the second day after the storm I called Sinai to confirm that Alex’s appointment had not been changed; they said nothing at the hospital had been disrupted. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day. There were some buses going into Manhattan from downtown Brooklyn, but the lines were so long, and the routes so confusing, I convinced Alex to let us take a cab. The traffic was slow, but not intolerable; it flowed easily enough once we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into unelectrified lower Manhattan, although we had to treat every intersection as though it had a stop sign, since the traffic lights were out. Police were everywhere, but it seemed more like they were preparing for a parade than dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. Many businesses looked open, although I did see a few dumpsters overflowing with what I assumed were discarded perishables. The streets were relatively empty, as though it were an early Sunday morning. As we progressed north — past intermittent clusters of FEMA, Con Edison, and news trucks — Manhattan shaded rapidly back to normal. Our driver pointed out a crane in the distance above Midtown; it had come loose from a giant condo building during the hurricane and was now dangling precariously above an evacuated block. Other than that, with lower Manhattan behind us, it was a day like any other.

We arrived at the office nearly an hour early, having overestimated how long the journey from Brooklyn would take. We watched — there was no position in the waiting room from which you could avoid watching — the coverage of the storm we kept failing to experience. They spliced Doppler images of the swirling tentacular mass with footage of it reaching landfall, of houses being swept away, of emergency rescues of the elderly. Then the president was talking about the damage, projecting, as they say, leadership; the elections were rapidly approaching. For the first time, national politicians were speaking openly, if obliquely, about extreme weather’s relation to climate change, about the need to storm-proof our cities. Then the governor of New Jersey was surveying damage from a helicopter. I reminded Alex that in 2010 Stephen Hawking claimed the survival of the species depended on moon colonization. She reminded me the Mayan calendar indicated the world would end this coming December 22. She found a New Yorker on the table among the parenting magazines; “I can’t get away from this thing,” she said, moving her jaw around, probably unconsciously, as if it were sore. I thought of Calvin claiming his had thinned from radiation. At least one of the Indian Point reactors had been taken off-line as a result of the storm.

Say that, from a small swivel chair beside the plastic reclining one, I watch as the doctor covers Alex’s stomach and the sonographic wand with clear gel. The GE Vivid 7 Dimension Ultrasound System is the Rolls-Royce of ultrasound machinery, offering 4-D imaging capabilities along with blood-flow imaging, tissue tracking, and color flow. Normally the sonogram is conducted by a tech, not the doctor herself, but the tech, the doctor explains, lives in the Rockaways — or at least she did before the hurricane. On the flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull. The doctor dwells on the rapidly beating heart, then lets us hear it at high volume. It has only been a couple of months since I heard mine on a similar machine. The heartbeat is strong, she says, perfect, which is welcome news; Alex has had some unexplained bleeding, even some clotting, which we’ve been warned increases the already high rate of miscarriage. Confirming a heartbeat lowers the risk, although the chances the creature will never make landfall remain significant. It will be months before we can look closely at the aorta. As the doctor measures the diameter of the child’s head, I can’t avoid thinking of the baby octopuses. Neither Alex nor I speak, have any questions for the doctor, or take each other’s hand, but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.

Then we were walking. We moved slowly south along the park in silence. Given the storm, the normality felt bizarre: a tourist asked me to take her and her friends’ picture on the steps of the Met; I looked into the viewfinder and half expected to see inside their bodies. The pushcarts were out selling pretzels and hot dogs; there were joggers and dog walkers and nannies pushing multiples in thousand-dollar strollers. There was nothing in the speech or laughter or arguments I overheard to indicate crisis or emergency, no erratic behavior among the squirrels or Columbidae.

Around Fifty-ninth Street we decided we should determine how to get a bus back to Brooklyn, but it was harder to figure out on my phone than I expected, and my network connection was slow, intermittent. I realized I couldn’t smell the sad horses that were normally hitched to carriages along Central Park South; where did they hide them in the storm? We decided to keep heading downtown and, as night fell, I told Alex we should take another taxi; although, according to the GYN, the recent bleeding was unrelated to physical exertion, I thought she should take it relatively easy until she’d made it out of the first trimester. It was impossible, however, to hail a cab, although there was a steady stream of them; I wasn’t sure if this was because it was around five, when the cabs have their shift change, or because they didn’t want to head south because of the storm; regardless, innumerable yellow cabs passed us, but they were all off-duty. Still, I was confident we’d get one eventually if we just kept trying as we walked; I raised my arm each time I saw one approaching and finally, in the upper Thirties, one stopped, albeit tentatively. At the very mention of the word Brooklyn, however, he sped away. This happened two more times and soon we arrived at the threshold of electrification, the streets below us dark.

Reader, we walked on. A couple of restaurants and bars were open, selling drinks, at least, by candlelight. There was a diverse crowd on the corner of Eighteenth, and when we joined it, we saw that people were taking bottles of water from ten or twelve boxes that somebody had stacked there, probably the National Guard. No cab would stop, and Alex had to pee. When we got to Union Square, multiple food trucks were operating, and people were charging cell phones on their outlets. FEMA seemed to be using the park as a kind of hub. Somehow the giant Whole Foods had power, the illumination startling amid all the dark buildings. I hadn’t been there since the night before the last hurricane. I waited outside while Alex went to the bathroom. A reporter was filming a segment nearby and I walked within range of the camera and tungsten lights and waved; maybe you saw me.

When Alex emerged from the store, a bus stopped on the corner, but it was so full only the first few people in line were allowed on; it was heading south, but we had no reason to think it would ferry us to Brooklyn. I asked a cop on the corner of Broadway and Fifteenth how we could get back to Brooklyn, and he just shrugged dismissively; to my surprise, I felt a surge of rage, fantasized about striking him, and only then realized how many contradictory emotions were colliding and recombining within me. My smile was probably strange and Alex asked if I was okay. Between Whole Foods and the various generators police and city trucks were using, Union Square had been relatively bright; as we walked farther south, the dark was enveloping, cut less and less frequently by headlights; driving in the unregulated night was dangerous. Trying to remember the bustling uptown neighborhoods we’d left an hour or two ago, let alone the Brooklyn we’d set out from early that afternoon, was like trying to recall a different epoch. The sense of stability, the Upper East Side architecture, French Renaissance and Federal, seemed to belong to a former age, innocent and gilded, while the ultrasound technology seemed to me in the dark like a premonition from the future; both were too alien to integrate into a narrative. I felt equidistant from all my memories as my sense of time collapsed: blue sparks in Monique’s mouth when she bit down on wintergreen candy; hallucinating from a fever in Mexico City; watching the shuttle disaster on live TV. I looked up at the looming buildings whose presence I could now sense more than see and wondered how many people were still inside them. Here and there you could perceive a beam moving across a window, a flame, the glow of an LED, but the overall effect was of emptiness. I told Alex I felt fine. For some reason I imagined there were Sabbath elevators in each building, imagined that they were still running quietly, drawing their power from some other source, some other time.

We must have headed east as streets had dead-ended, because we were on Lafayette and Canal when two men approached us, at least one of them drunk, and asked for money. In the absence of streetlights and established order there was a long moment in which I couldn’t tell if they were begging or threatening to rob us, making a demand; relations were newly indeterminate, the cues hard for me to read, as if, along with power, we’d lost a kind of social proprioception. I said I didn’t have any, and the men persisted, but without any explicit threat; before I could decide what to do or say, Alex gave the men a couple of dollars, and they vanished.

It was getting cold. We saw a bright glow to the east among the dark towers of the Financial District, like the eyeshine of some animal. Later we would learn it was Goldman Sachs, see photographs in which one of the few illuminated buildings in the skyline was the investment banking firm, an image I’d use for the cover of my book — not the one I was contracted to write about fraudulence, but the one I’ve written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction. Its generators must have been immense; or did they have special access to a secret grid? Soon we were heading south and west and the dark felt briefly total; I thought of Marfa, the buildings around me like permanent installations in the desert night. I tried to describe this feeling to Alex, but my voice sounded weird in the lightless streets — loud, conspicuous, although there was plenty of other noise: somebody was hammering something nearby; I could hear, but not see, a helicopter; the slow, high-pitched braking of a large truck in the near distance sounded submarine, like whale song. A cab surprised us as we turned onto Park Place, the felt absence of the twin towers now difficult to distinguish from the invisible buildings. I had the sensation that if power were suddenly restored, the towers would be there, swaying a little. Although I could see that someone was in the back of the car, someone I imagined as on both sides of the poem — Bernard and Natali’s daughter, Liza, Ari — I tried to hail the cab; I’d heard cabs could pick up multiple fares as a result of the storm, fares from multiple worlds, but it didn’t stop for us.

I asked Alex how she was holding up; she said that she was fine, but I knew she was tired and cold. What if she were eight months pregnant and I’d accidentally led her into this state of nature? You haven’t led me anywhere, she said, laughing, when I expressed the concern aloud. There was a small mammal developing within her — this was the week for taste buds, teeth buds. We would work out my involvement as we went along. A bodega was weakly illuminated by a generator and I went in to get a bottle of water and a couple of granola bars, as we hadn’t eaten since our early lunch. There was a strong smell of vegetable rot; the refrigerated cases had all been emptied, but there was some old produce on a shelf, and the floors were still wet. I didn’t see any water, but when I asked for it, the man behind the counter produced a large bottle. I asked him how much it was and he said ten dollars. I saw the other goods he had secured behind the counter like the treasures that they were: packages of batteries, flashlights, strike-anywhere matches, Clif bars, instant coffee. I asked the price of each in turn, and each time he said ten dollars, smiling. A few miles away they would cost no more than before the storm; prices rise in the dark. I bought the water and a Luna bar for Alex with the weakening currency and we resumed our walk.

As we passed City Hall and approached the Brooklyn Bridge there were plenty of people and headlights, police were directing traffic, and there were clusters of city trucks — fire, ambulances, sanitation, etc. There were two military jeeps parked on Centre Street. Brooklyn was illuminated across the river, sparkling in a different era. We had already walked some seven miles, having not planned to walk more than one; I asked Alex if she wanted me to inquire about a bus, but she said no, that she’d prefer to “do it all.” A steady current of people attired in the usual costumes was entering the walkway onto the bridge and there was a strange energy crackling among us; part parade, part flight, part protest. Each woman I imagined as pregnant, then I imagined all of us were dead, flowing over London Bridge. What I mean is that our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. I’m quoting now, like John Gillespie Magee. When we were over the water, under the cables, we stopped and looked back. Uptown the city was brighter than ever, although as you looked north you saw the darkened projects against the light. They looked two-dimensional, like cardboard cutouts in a stagecraft foreground. Lower Manhattan was black behind us, its densities intuitive. The fireworks celebrating the completion of the bridge exploded above us in 1883, spidering out across the page. The moon is high in the sky and you can see its light on the water. I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America:

In Brooklyn we will catch the B63 and take it up Atlantic. After a few stops, I will stand and offer my seat to an elderly woman with two large houseplants in black plastic bags. My feet will ache only then, my knees stiffen a little. A snake plant, a philodendron. Everything will be as it had been. Then, even though it would sound improbable in fiction, the woman with the plants will turn to Alex and say: Are you expecting? She will explain there is a certain glow. She’ll guess it is a girl. The sonar pings will prove to be the ringtone of a teenager in the seat behind me who will answer her phone by yelling, “I’m basically there. Chill, I’m basically there.” It and everything else I hear tonight will sound like Whitman, the similitudes of the past, and those of the future, corresponding. We’ll get off where the bus turns right onto Fifth and walk east. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. We’ll see the ghost bike — a memorial for a dead cyclist — chained to the street sign. We’ll see the sidewalk littered with flowers from an early-blooming Callery pear. The plywood placard will say her name was Liz Padilla; Why not dedicate, Alex will ask, this book to her? The small flame in a gas lamp on Saint Mark’s will flicker across genres. We’ll give wide berth to a discarded box spring near the curb, as it might contain bedbugs, but tonight even parasitic insects will appear to me as a bad form of collectivity that can stand as a figure of its possibility, circulating blood from host to host. Like a joke cycle, like a prosody. Don’t get carried away, Alex will say, when she offers me a penny — no — strong six figures for my thoughts. In 1986, I put a penny under my tongue in an attempt to increase my temperature and trick the school nurse into sending me home so I could watch a movie. Did it work?

We will stop to get something to eat at a sushi restaurant in Prospect Heights — just vegetable rolls, as Alex is pregnant and the seas are poisoned and the superstorm has shut down all the ports. A couple beside us will debate the relative merits of condos and co-ops, the woman insisting with increasing intensity that her partner “doesn’t understand the process,” that this isn’t “the developing world.” Sitting at a small table looking through our reflection in the window onto Flatbush Avenue, I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.

“Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’” —Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, February 4, 1986