The Strange Truth About Us Read online

  The Strange Truth About Us

  Contents

  Part One.

  Annotations about an Absence: Going Forward

  Part Two.

  Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence: Benchmarking:

  Part Three.

  Other Prose Surrounding Absence

  a.

  Our Secret

  Movie Emotions

  Highway 17 Revisited

  Marriage with Dogs

  The Outlook for Quirky

  His Signs

  Waiting

  When the Time Comes

  b.

  January 24

  Q & A

  The Age

  Trajectory

  Shift

  What Is Shown

  c.

  A Serious Story

  What Mattered

  Along the Way

  Finally

  There Must Be a Reason

  The Unaccountable

  They Built a Wall

  Rush Job

  The Play Was Going to Be Huge

  The North Pole

  Hereditary Job

  Journey to the Unknown Regions of the Extreme Outside

  d.

  Woman Interviews Self with Reference to Stories

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The flies will die like flies.

  Life will be complex like life.

  The universe will be infinite like the universe.

  Ultimate things will remain unutterable like ultimate things.

  —Prophecy, Peter Handke

  Part One.

  Annotations about an Absence:

  Going Forward

  1.

  Here we are—you and me—sitting in our back garden amusing ourselves with our minds. We are using our minds—our imaginations—to picture the future. We are taking what we imagine and forming it into a make-believe novel that we are calling The Strange Truth About Us.

  Like the future, the novel doesn’t actually exist. It’s an idea, an entertainment, a fanciful diversion in which we punch in the numbers, call the future up. Ring; ring; ring; ring ... So far, the future hasn’t answered. But we know it’s there.

  2.

  We know it’s there because its shadow moves behind the upstairs window of an old frame house. The thin curtain undulates. Someone or something is watching us. A madman with a knife?

  3.

  We imagine we are trailing the future like bloodhounds; we’ve got the scent but not the quarry. But the future, like a terrified fox, keeps eluding us. We imagine its outline, though dimly.

  4.

  And we devour the published consciousness of others. The stories about a future in which all roads are dangerous and lead to death: where because of rising ocean levels, we drown; where because of global heating, we die of thirst; where because of the overuse of antibiotics, we succumb by the millions to a gruesome new plague; where we are captured as slaves or eaten by lampreys; where we become eyeless, blob-like creatures who live in underground caverns and are excavated for our tender meat; where we become oppressed by a conspiracy of robots; where we become terrorized by psychopathic motorcycle gangs; where the oceans have become dead zones due to a sudden population explosion of poisonous jellyfish; where beyond all expectations, we discover a habitable planet, a blue planet like our own before we ruined it, but we don’t have the technology to get there; where because we have embraced Jehovah, we are picnicking in Eden—on a green hillside with our loved ones and the risen dead who are all smiling, plump, and happy, while the sun shines and fruit trees offer up apples, peaches, plums, as nearby a lion lies down with a lamb ...

  5.

  So we concoct a make-believe novel and a set of annotations in which ...

  We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life:

  We are afraid.

  6.

  We weren’t prepared for this kind of fear. We were only prepared for the fear of losing money or love, or the fear associated with threats to our safety—travelling in planes, getting lost in unlit places.

  We were only prepared to have more of what we had; expected the future to be a smart fit with our shiny new things; with our present well-being, our fun. Like the advertising circular promoting cellphones announced: Meet the future. It’s friendly.

  The future wants to be your friend.

  That’s what we had banked on.

  But that’s no longer what we believe.

  7.

  We have conceived The Strange Truth About Us as a series of tactful exchanges. Within these exchanges we do not exclaim, retort, say, ask, declare, hiss, snort, grin, or shout, except by implication. Neither do we rake fingers through our hair, comment upon the scenery, make love, or engage in any other movement.

  8.

  What is it that we do in this imaginary novel?

  We talk.

  We talk like this:

  — What do you mean things are crumbling?

  — Look at the evidence. The climate. The generalized threat. The terror—from outside; from within our borders. All manner of social chaos—drugs, gangs, homelessness, foreclosures, poor health, arrogant politicians, pedophile priests. Everything is breaking down; all the old values, all the institutions are falling into fragments. That’s what crumbling means.

  — I don’t really mind that word. It’s organic, somehow. Slow. It sounds natural. Manageable. As opposed to catastrophic.

  9.

  Strange—truth no longer has a roof over its head.

  Truth—the oblique familiar.

  10.

  The novel is written around catastrophic weather events such as drought, floods, and hurricanes. And though the average temperature of the world’s ride may have risen nearly one degree over the past fifty years, some of us on the planet still experience calm, though humid weather, and generally ironic conditions.

  11.

  Only meteorologists using climate modelling seem proficient at predicting the future, albeit a somewhat limited, short-term future.

  Yet because of them and their TV broadcasts we’ve become well-informed about tsunami waves, rogue waves, flash floods, seismic indicators of earthquakes, drought and the attendant crop damage, and the entire range of catastrophic wind events, particularly hurricanes and tornados. We can now converse with some intelligence about these occurrences in much the same way as we converse about the cure rates of many cancers, and of pandemics in general.

  12.

  About—all around from outside; all around from a centre.

  13.

  Regarding hurricanes, these are personalized with English or Latino names as if they were avenging deities, which is a nice mythological touch, we think, and serves to ameliorate the tragic destruction they cause. It’s a relief to shake our fists at something we can name but isn’t a real person. Thus Claudette and Danny batter the Philippines, Juan hurls wind over the coast of Florida, Katrina shames a wrathful nation through the destruction of New Orleans.

  14.

  We try to keep our mindsets in good working order. These are the emotional and intellectual wrappings through which we experience the world and which allow us to abide in a state of relative non-contamination.

  Belief in the ideas of civil behaviour, earned wealth, right to privilege, the duty of the state to protect us, personal longevity based on correct eating and exercise habits are a few features of our shared mindsets.

  15.

  We have the sensation that we are hurtling towards the future. It’s the speed of current life that leads us to feel this way; the nanosecond fact of an electronic existence. This urgency of movement is non-l
inear, though, and we have the suspicion that we are hurtling nowhere—another strange truth about us. Bound by the container of current times, our sense of hurtling is in reality the motion of bubbles on the boil.

  16.

  — We will get the future we deserve.

  — We will get the future that accidentally happens.

  — So it has been. But which future are we considering here? One that is ten years down the road? A hundred? A thousand?

  — That’s what we’re trying to imagine.

  — We’re trying to imagine the unimaginable.

  — That’s the idea.

  — Here’s something. In the future, people will watch films of us performing in movies, TV shows, concerts. They’ll look at our art, read our books. These things will function as memory.

  — The current thinking is that the relative good times of the past sixty years have been an anomaly, a blip. That history is really a weary continuum of ...

  — I think they’ll like our music best. Our rock bands and stage shows. They’ll watch us performing at concerts while marvelling at the huge amplifiers, the cheering crowds. They’ll watch us dressed as cowboys and country maidens dancing around stacks of hay ...

  17.

  Us—the subject of a verb—an oblique case: an objective pronoun; ourselves.

  18.

  — There will still be museums and libraries in the future, won’t there? Our collection will be safe?

  — I don’t know. It’s anyone’s guess how things will pan out.

  — But I’m counting on it. The masks and rattles. The soapstone carvings. We’ve got authentication papers. Certificates of ownership. Don’t tell me our collecting has been for nothing.

  — It just might have been. The collection may be worthless. There may be no place to house it. In the future, I mean.

  — Don’t say that. I’ve dreamed of a special room. The collection mounted. Little information cards alongside each piece. It would be our legacy.

  — Yes. I’d hoped that, too. But there may not be a special room. Anywhere.

  19.

  Bewilderment—the all-encompassing present—is too encompassing.

  Here in the annotations we motivate that convoluted nervous substance in our skulls ...

  Think! Try to imagine!

  20.

  It’s a warm afternoon in mid-October with low cloud and high belief in a world of our own matters.

  We’re sitting side by side in Cape Cod chairs and have moved from drinking tea to drinking martinis. It could be the eve of the future, we say, Future’s Eve—if only the future would answer our calls, reveal itself, so we can raise our glasses in cheer or fear.

  You and me in matching shorts and sandals, a pair of aging blonds imparadised these many years in our pearl of a world. We’re some pair!

  21.

  Look at us sitting in our garden of minimalist delights. There are banks of orange, yellow, and pink chrysanthemums that we planted ourselves. And shrubbery: aromatic Bluebeards, Chinese Plumbago, and a beautyberry bush covered with small purple fruit. There’s a trimmed willow tree, a freshly mowed lawn.

  We’ve placed garden ornaments about for our ambient pleasure: a wooden fish painted blue, a faux owl with gold and silver feathers, a pot of marbles, a robin as large as a man, a small concrete frieze of naked maidens and warriors romping in innocence.

  While we, in our ruminating innocence, attempt to puzzle out catastrophe.

  Even as the sun breaks through.

  What could be more lovely?

  22.

  What could be lovelier than the pair of us hidden away in our corralled afternoon? No one in the world can see us!

  The private security patrol which passes by our portion of the brick fence at three-hour intervals, night and day, will not make an appearance for another forty-five minutes, though the surveillance camera remains on, its sweep missing the section of garden where we sit in pushed-away time.

  While beyond the corral ...

  23.

  None of this is mentioned in The Strange Truth About Us.

  It only appears here in the moist familiar.

  Where my toes graze your bare leg when I am making a point. Where your hands cover your eyes when thinking deeply.

  24.

  — The animal factor. That’s what it comes down to. We’re animals on the alert for danger.

  — Like a rat sniffing air. I don’t like it.

  — Nor do I. But more and more of us have begun to contemplate our predicament.

  — I wonder what Stone Age people contemplated.

  — Plants, probably. Fire.

  — The whole thing is creepy.

  — There you are.

  — Yes. Here I am.

  — Are we out of olives?

  — Almost.

  25.

  Vodka martini,

  shaken, not stirred,

  said James Bond

  in 1953.

  26.

  Strange—one’s own wonder.

  27.

  We love discussion, and the fleeting bronze light of early evening. We appreciate the general truth that nature provides many strange and lovely things, including the happiness we have found in each other.

  We love the singular story that is us. And our garden. And the strange beauty of cloud gaps through which moonlight falls.

  We love the cornucopia of slower pleasures—reading, walking, discussion, reflection. Our voices intertwined as in song.

  28.

  We consider ourselves sophisticated people. Note our cavalier yet scrutinizing take on the world. Meaning that while we may hate the world in theory we have, until now, managed to ride through it in a state of semi-fulfillment.

  29.

  Unlike Winston, the frail dissident in George Orwell’s novel 1984. He found a place in his room where he could escape the all-seeing eye of Big Brother. But we don’t wish to escape the eye of the camera. We are glad of it and pay for its gaze.

  But the camera is not the subject of the novel.

  It’s its predicate.

  30.

  We know that the camera will record which future—from all the potential threads of possibility that now reside in the present—will ultimately unfold. The camera will play what it captures back to us for our viewing pleasure—in a future time we’re trying hard to imagine.

  31.

  There are many futures running parallel to one another and they all remain hidden. When one of these futures has declared itself and become evident, then, in retrospect, we will say that this future was inevitable.

  We think this makes sense.

  But which future will emerge?

  We keep on dialling.

  Anyone there?

  32.

  Actually, the strange truth is that the future is empty. There is no one and nothing in it. But the cameras will remain on; we are certain of that. The cameras will record what the future looks like when it arrives. For this reason many of us see the future as a news program.

  33.

  Lacking indifference, we practise disquiet, ponder the mental necessity of insight.

  34.

  We are coming to believe in catastrophe and transience, in sexuality upon a polluted planet, in a re-visioned world many years in the making, in tea and martinis, in beautyberry bushes and faux owls with gold and silver feathers, in bold chrysanthemums, in a bizarre global expression of irony acquitted with a sideways glance.

  We, the aging blonds of our own making. The couple with a freshly mowed lawn and abundant shrubbery.

  With garden decorations and Cape Cod chairs. With our temporarily peaceful breaths.

  35.

  We, the matching side-by-side pair of the adored and adorned vegetative paradise, gaze upon the futuristic pod which sits so chastely amongst the chrysanthemums in our garden. Egg-shaped, three feet tall, made of stainless steel, it rests upon a support of four splayed wooden legs. Its top is cracked open and fro
m this cavity a white-gloved hand, a Mickey Mouse hand, holds a yellow plastic daisy. The garden pod is as incongruous as anything by Bosch, and this is why we see it as a clue to the future.

  36.

  In the future we think we’ll be startled, charmed, dismayed, and even frightened by novelty.

  Just as we are now.

  37.

  We think a novel should be novel.

  38.

  — Did you realize that most of us in the Western world spend between six and fifteen hours a day plugged into something? Phones, computers, TVs. That’s most of a lifetime.

  — You’ve got to do something with a lifetime.

  — That’s weak.

  — I know.

  39.

  The strange truth about us is that we are hidden because we sit where the shade is, although it is also true that we are hiding out from the world, that we are absent from its pressing concerns. We don’t deny this; we find it necessary.

  40.

  We find it necessary because, while we were successful according to the world’s most recent wisdom, we are, at present, reviled. Now our modest wealth equals greed; our satisfaction equals heartlessness; our pleasure in life equals obscenity.