Future Perfect

Abstract

A decade ago, a man I was coming to know invited me over to his friend's house to look at some art. I knew this man well enough to predict he wouldn't be able to resist buying a painting. He always bought the painting. His friend lived on a sleepy street, and the front porch of his home overflowed with faded yard art and discarded pots. The interior was equally chaotic: art deco statues and a jumble of saggy, antique furniture circled a TV. The place smelled like dog piss.The friend welcomed us with cans of PBR and then led us up a dark, winding staircase to the hallway that turned out to be a kind of art gallery. Yellowed insulation hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. The lights in the hallway didn't work, and so we looked at the murky paintings with a flashlight. Just as I anticipated, the man I was with agreed to buy a still life. Nature morte, I said, remembering my rusty French.Oddly, the friend then invited us into his bedroom. Everything about this man and this place felt strange and now, this peculiar invitation to enter his private room. Just beyond his bed and against the wall stood a six-foot tall fortune-telling machine. Incongruous and magical at the same time, a plaster statue of a woman from the waist up was held captive inside a glass case, a ceiling light shining on her pale face. She wore a purple turban, and her alabaster hands hovered over a crystal ball. The front of her encasement held a sign: “Know your future! It's Amazing! It's True!” I went up to her and put my palm flat against the glass, entranced.“Go ahead,” said the friend, handing me a quarter. “See what she says.”I punched the button marked “Cancer June 21-July 22” and out popped a little scroll the size of a lipstick. I unwound it. “Your ambitions will pay off,” it read. I pondered this. I had worked hard for several decades and that ambition had both eaten me up and rewarded me. The fortune continued: “A slight sentimental delusion is expected because you have centered your interests on a single person.”I considered the odd use of the passive voice. And then, I thought, angrily, “Why didn't I receive this message earlier in my life?” It would have been so very helpful. I rewound the scroll and carefully tucked it into my pocket.Later that night, unable to sleep, I wondered: Why must we wander so blindly into every new situation? Why can't we know both the pitfalls and the pleasures before we take the first step forward? When we're thinking about moving to a new town or taking a new job, couldn't we get a hint from the Great Beyond as to how it will work out? Why can't we, when we meet a new person, know she will enrich your life or he will squeeze every drop of blood from your heart?The future has been my preoccupation, even from my early writing days. The first short story I wrote as a sixth grader involved a tent, an ominous prophecy, and a fortune teller like the one I had just seen in the case. What was the prophecy in my childhood story? I can't recall. There's no accounting for the inaccuracies of memory or the prognostications one can only see looking backwards.The next day, after bidding adieu to the encased gypsy, I am home, sitting outside at dusk in my Ohio farm backyard. As the sky darkens, I rise from my chair and walk across the lawn. A glimmering disk of a moon is coming up over the field. As I walk, thousands of fireflies lift off the lawn en masse, like a constellation rising. The air damp and minty, I am transported back to my grandmother's house in the Pennsylvania woods, walking in her gardens after dark, trapping lightning bugs in a jar I pilfered from her kitchen. I am eleven and fifty-something in the same moment. As I shuffle in the growing dark, I remind myself of my aging mother, taking small steps so as not to trip and fall. Suddenly, I am “unstuck in time,” like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. And like Vonnegut's Trafalmagorians, I experience time not in three dimensions, but four—the past, present and future existing simultaneously and, then, the fourth-dimension bonus prize of being able to perceive any point in time at will. Listening to the pulsing crickets, I squint at the light in my farmhouse windows—or are they the windows of my grandmother's house?The past begins dancing with the present, and instead of enjoying the jig, here I am, trying with all my might, with the help of my Fortune Teller, to hear the beat of the future. But the past is just so damn easy, I think, like a cheap date, readily accessible, little kisses of smell, sound and taste; keepsakes and photos are all she—the loose past—needs to give it up. But Mr. Future plays impossible to get—the object of my desire, perennially elusive.If we can flash back, I wonder, why not flash forward? There would be symmetry in that. Like left hand and right. Darkness and light. Unequal access to the past and the future seems a cosmic oversight—a stinginess or a failure of imagination on the part of those who set up the whole damn human experience. As the Queen in Alice in Wonderland ruefully said, “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”Before going back into my house that night, I imagine untwisting the top of the jar and letting my captured fireflies go.A writing teacher explained to me how narrative works. It's not the surprise nor the plot twists that matter; both art and life are expressed in the unfolding of events. He offered an example: Even if you knew two trains traveling the same track were going to crash into each other, the story happens in the watching. And so life involves sitting on the hill above the tracks, knowing that someone is asleep at the switch and the crash inevitable. You hold your breath, and you watch. And as always, you look for clues to the plot as the trains move down the track. Sometimes, when you're lucky, the clues are served up on a silver platter carried by a handsome waiter in the first-class passenger car.Here's one example of that perfectly served clue to the future:More than a decade ago, I dragged myself home from work in the February dusk. I brought in the mail and spread it on the kitchen table. I was living alone and hated coming home to a cold, empty house, and so, as I did daily, I made a little teepee of wood and started a fire in the wood stove. While the fire spit and crackled, I opened an envelope addressed to my ex-husband who hadn't lived at this address for years. In the time since he moved out, I'd fallen in love with another man who lived far from me, by the sea. The cheaply produced letter announced: “Buy One Burial Space . . . and Get a Second One Free!” Clearly, this was meant for a couple who hoped to spend eternity lying next to one another in the cold, hard ground.But this piece of mail contained a message about my future—I just couldn't comprehend it at the time. Within a year, I would lose two of the most important men in my life: my ex-husband to cancer and the Man by the Sea who simply, and rather predictably, fled to a younger woman.As I write down this memory, I conjugate the pain, hoping to find the words, the tense, to make it tolerable.Future tense: I will need both burial spaces: one in reality and one metaphorically.Past perfect: Had she read the flyer with insight, she would have known she was getting two endings for the price of one.Future perfect: I will have mourned both men.The fearsome, slippery mystery of the future compels us, and thus, a billion-dollar industry devoted to forecasting thrives. The weather—we've got that down. Hour by hour, even minute by minute, you can plan your golf game, your planting and harvesting with a few clicks. But still, you can't power up the laptop to forecast what your life holds. Love or loss? Most likely a little of both. But that fork in the road—which way do you go? Do you take this job or that? Marry this person or that one? Through the miracle of medical technology, we can tell, before it emerges from the womb, the gender of a child, and even if it will have a hole in its heart or six fingers. But the events, sorrows, and successes of our lives—we wander blindly into each one. Luck, fate, predestination . . . these are the forces that become the sweet juice of religions and psychics.“It was in the cards.”“You could see that coming.”“It was meant to be.”These phrases fool us into thinking that we are marching along some preordained path. But in the middle of my life, after being roughed up a bit, I consider that life is just a random series of events that has little apparent rhyme or reason. There are no formulas for knowing what's next, no A + B = C to life. Even if we know A and B, the answer might be Q or Z. Or, what concerns me most, no answer at all.Sometimes, tantalizing hints of my future appear on my screen without bidding. The Man by the Sea signed me up for Astrology.comDaily Love Tarot years ago, and try as I might, I can't unsubscribe. Every day around 2:30 a.m., just about the time I awake, disoriented and lonely in the night, my Daily Love Tarot arrives.Here's one reading: “The Three of Swords card suggests that dwelling on past pain, heartbreak, or loss leaves you vulnerable to further attack or reopens old wounds. It can ultimately consume you.” All the air leaves my chest. I have been digging at the deep wound of the past until I can't stop the bleeding. “Thoughts of getting even will make things worse.” I know, I know, I shouldn't have sent those scathing e-mails to the Man by the Sea. “Taking each betrayal or loss too personally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so that when you do finally trust again, you find yourself embroiled in the same emotional drama you vowed to avoid.” This is embarrassingly true. But what does this tell me about what I should do next?My craving to know my destiny is a need in me, and for many in the human tribe, as strong as breathing. Perhaps it's hardwired in us from a prehistoric era. Memory tells us when the rain falls and the herds run, so it is, in essence, a survival tool. And what is the evolutionary need to forecast the future—is it also about survival? In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim knew everything that would happen in his life, even how he would die, and he could visit the past and the future at will, seeing his death over and over again. At the age of 53, he gives a speech at a convention and tells the crowd that a man he knew during the war is going to murder him. The crowd begins to protest, not wanting the killing to take place. Billy then says, “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said.” And then he closes his speech with his time-tripping sign off: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”I know what you're thinking, smart reader. What about the present? I've read the self-help books that tell us all we have is the moment we are experiencing, and that the present is a gift—ha! It is our friend. “The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is the relationship with the Now,” writes one of Oprah's featured authors. But the Now is ephemeral, just air. The moment you recognize now, it is gone—it is already past, taken away on a breeze. C.S. Lewis wrote: “For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.” And so one might posture that there is no such thing as now, only the intersection of the past and the present. The Greeks didn't have a deity of the present, but they did have Janus, the two-headed god who could see the past and the future at the same time. He welcomes the new year in January while he looks back to December. I wonder: Can Janus put his finger on when it's now?Now?Or now?Maybe now?“The Planning Monster,” the Man by the Sea calls me. It is not an endearment. We have been seeing each other for several years from a very long distance. I'm consumed with putting our next gathering on the calendar. I'm obsessed with figuring out how and when we can live together. Though I'm embarrassed to admit it, I do bully him about a ring. This is a man who doesn't own a calendar, who remembers all things in his head. He can chart a trip around the globe on the back of a napkin, all take offs and landings. He is Mr. Now, Mr. In-The-Moment. We are oil and water in this way; still, I push and I push. “Let's put it on the calendar,” I urge, and he scowls. I never stop urging him to put it on his non-existent calendar.It is New Year's Eve, and I have gone to a party in my neighborhood. The Man by the Sea is far away at home, having missed, in his delay, the cheap fares for the holiday weekend. I say I understand but am drinking the toxic cocktail of sad belligerence. Despite how I feel about his absence, I have a lovely time at the party talking with colleagues and friends. I get into my Jetta to leave and promptly back into a tree stump. I don't even get out to see if my rear light is smashed. I am so utterly in the moment (or, if I'm honest in my recall, slightly drunk) that when I get home, I park and go into the house to watch the festivities from New York City on TV. I don't even think about calling the Man by the Sea to say “Happy New Year.” Or I do think about it, but say “fuck it.”Later, I will learn that he meets a young woman at a party that night and sleeps with her. Ten days later, he will call me on a cold morning when the sky is the color of bluebirds and tell me this news.“With you, it was always about what's next,” he says in his not-so-gentle goodbye.If I had looked in my life's rearview mirror, perhaps I would have seen this coming.We have all known people who have a sense of personal destiny—those who know where the train is taking them and are unafraid to get on board and take their seats.I have a friend who, at 20, knew she was going to be a poet and everything in her being said, “This will happen.” And it did. Several books, a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize . . . it all became real. I've now lived long enough to see my friends become who I thought they would become—and winced as others lost their way.In many ways, I chose the perfect profession for someone preoccupied with the future: college admissions dean. It was my job to review what young people had accomplished through their first 18 years in order to assess, predict even, what they would do in the future.In my role as dean, I was interviewing a student in Palestine over Skype for admission to the Ohio college where I worked. The young man was articulate and emotional; he spoke quickly with dizzying hand gestures and a strong accent. His eyes were dark and sincere, and I was drawn to his story of being a Palestinian raised in Jordan and educated at a Quaker school. He told me without hesitation, his image pixelating on my screen, that someday “I will have become the leader of the Palestinian people.” He didn't say that he wants to become this but that he will have become the person to bring about peace in these troubled lands. I marveled at his certainty and his awkward use of the future perfect. He said confidently that this will have happened and then that will have happened, and the future, just like the verb tense, will be nothing less than ideal.I watched him power through four years and graduate with the college's top leadership award, his personal forecast on its way to becoming true.I'm visiting my mother. My father has died a few months earlier, and she now lives alone in an apartment in our Minnesota home town. I visit every month and stay for the weekend, preparing her meals, dressing her, even sleeping next to her at night. She often holds my hand as we go to sleep.I'm cooking one late afternoon when she calls me from the bathroom. She is 80, and her joints and muscles are contracting, making her crooked and frail. “I need you.” I hear her call and feel the flashback: This is the same way my sisters and I used to call her from the bathroom when we were little and needed our bums wiped.“Mom?”I walk into the bathroom and find her tangled in her sleeveless top and bra. For whatever reason, she has tried to remove them simultaneously, and now she's trapped. We laugh nervously as we work together to untangle her. I help her as best I can without looking at her nakedness or hurting her poor, sore body. Even though she is standing in front of the mirror, I avert my eyes: I don't want to see how my body will deteriorate. I realize that maybe, just maybe, I don't want to know anything about what's coming ’round the bend.When I was in high school, I was devoted to reading Thomas Wolfe, the Southern fiction writer who died before he turned 40. Though he was once lauded as the Dostoyevsky of America, he's often left out of the American canon because he's seen as an over-writer, a blow hard, as someone who was not a great writer but who had a great editor—Maxwell Perkins—because he needed one. In all his work, he wrote about yearning—sexual, of course, but also yearning for meaning and adventure and truth. He famously yearned for home but then never arrived there. “It was only when he got there [home] that his homelessness began,” he said of the protagonist in You Can't Go Home Again. As a senior in high school, I would lie in my tiny bedroom in our Victorian home and read his novels, feeling the rocking of the train his characters were riding while listening to the real trains chugging down the edge of the Mississippi, three blocks from my bedroom window. I wrote in my journal, “I'm longing for that something that never arrives,” which made me feel so close to, so much like, Wolfe.Forty years later, I know that this something—the future—is continually arriving but that it's not what I expected.The last man I lived with was my high school prom date. After more than 35 years without contact, he showed up, a bald sprite, at my father's funeral.“I thought you might be here,” he said with a movie star smile.“You got your teeth fixed,” I said, remembering his overlapped front teeth.As we learned to live together, we were old and young simultaneously, remembering our three-day prom date in minute detail as we put arthritis cream on our feet. We danced to Motown and took our blood pressure meds. Time was loopy and fun as we coasted through our days. By example, he made me slow down, live in the moment. He had absolutely no plans for next week, next month, next year. With him, I had no desire to look beyond the current moment. I came to understand that he was here to help me reorient my relationship not with him but with time itself.While we lived together, he would look down at me as I woke and say, “You have your 18-year-old face on today, my dear.” And I would say back, “And you, Sweetie, look exactly 18, well, maybe 19.” In that moment, I befriended the confusion, the collapsing of time, and believed that it was entirely possible to be a teenager and a senior citizen simultaneously, and that the past and the future radiated in that moment from our faces. Trying to differentiate between 1975 and 2015 became, over the course of our years together, utterly irrelevant.For a season in my early sixties, I lived in the South of France, a place I never imagined or predicted I would go, living a life no fortune teller could have foreseen in her crystal ball. The years had fallen away as I buried my mother, left my job at the college, said adieu to both the man who loved art and the bald sprite.While in Provence, I tried for the second time in my life to learn French. My college French class had delivered my one and only transcripted C. In my new class, I was the oldest student; the rest were young people studying at the affiliated art institute, and we learned, because the vocabulary was useful to them, all the terminology for an artist: pinceaux, peinture, nature morte. How a still life could be called nature morte is just one of the many mysteries of the French language.One day in April, with the soft Mediterranean light filtering into our classroom, our teacher appears at the door and enters, sullenly. Rather than prancing around at the board with her colored markers conjugating irregular verbs, she sits, her hands folded in front of her, as if praying. The night before, Notre Dame Cathedral had caught fire, and a large section of the building had been destroyed. Our teacher tells us that Notre Dame is the emotional symbol for a unified, peaceful France. On 25 août 1944, all Parisiens walked toward Notre Dame to gather, and quietly acknowledge, la fin de la guerre mondiale, the end of the second World War. She says that the fire is suprenant (surprising) and choquant (shocking). We then dissect a sad Victor Hugo poem about Notre Dame, the central symbol of French identity now partially gone up in smoke. Eternity becomes ephemera.At the end of the poem, the teacher clears her throat and says, “And now for the future tense.” It is a whiplash teaching moment, but the French are delightfully on-task people, and the syllabus must be obeyed.We learn that the French have two ways of expressing the future. The futur proche is the near future: Je vais aimer–I am going to love. Futur simple is more of a commitment. J'aimerai—I will love. “Futur simple means you will do something in the future with 100 percent certainty,” the teacher reminds us.Ah, certainty. As someone born in the middle of the last century, I'm not sure I've ever really known how certainty feels. In third grade, I watched a war on TV and practiced hiding under my desk in case a tornado struck our town. My sixth-grade teacher, who wore his saucer-sized VFW belt every day, warned us that the Russians were coming to destroy the U.S. By the time I was in high school, a nuclear power plant was built at the edge of town, and we were told the plant could leak radiation and melt us in an instant or kill us with cancer. When my own children were young, the World Trade Center Towers collapsed. On the eve of my sixtieth birthday, a mad emperor entered the White House, shaking his scabbard at the North Koreans and the Chinese and whoever else irritated him that day. Today, our poor, tired planet is having climatic hot flashes and cooking up storms of unprecedented destruction. And in perhaps the most egregious example of piling-on imaginable, a renegade global virus rises on updrafts, jumping across the aisle or national borders at will.Uncertainty about the future is now running thick in our veins, mingling with our blood.There was no epiphany, no single moment when the fever of my obsession with the future broke. It slowly escaped, as if from an untied balloon, during the years I lived with my prom date, the bald sprite. And then during my season in France, it completely disappeared. Perhaps it was the muted light in the South of France, the light that inspired so many remarkable painters. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that I had finally worn myself out with worried anticipation.Living in a third-floor apartment in Aix-en-Provence, looking out on the centre ville, I heard a reminder of my mortality every single day. Something about the bells of the twelfth century Cathédrale Saint Sauveur clanging regularly outside my window signaled the ending was nigh. “Ring! Ring! Ring!” the cathedral bells rang with certainty. “It's almost over.”Across the course of that season, my preoccupation with the future was replaced by a reflex to look backward and remember. Fed by posts from schoolmates, journeys back to old journals, text messages from former beaus, visits—at least in my imagination—to places I had once lived, I bathed in memories. It stunned me how soothing, how deliciously rich, it was to live in the past for periods of each day.Walking the ancient, narrow streets of Aix one Sunday afternoon, I slowed my pace to watch the shadows sharpen the angles of the centuries-old buildings. Their color? “Ochre,” I whispered. I smelled the tart mix of fresh street garbage and baking bread and imagined the long filament of human history strung out in this one place: The Romans settling “the city of water” before Christ was born, the Visigoths plundering the place in the fifth century, and the women in the market collecting their baguettes 300 years ago—and three minutes ago. The fourth dimension came alive and the moment before me expanded and, feeling slightly “unstuck in time,” I entered a small, outdoor restaurant.“Je vais prendre un verre de rosé,” I tell the waiter in my halting French, I'm going to have a glass of rosé. I listen to the sharp tinkling of the outdoor fountain that contains, brilliantly, a copper bucket secured beneath the flowing stream, cooling the rosé. Those clever French, I think. I watch the vibrating shadows of plane leaves on the cobblestones. The muted sun is strong enough to warm my forearm. The urgency of wanting to get it all in—whatever it all is—is blessedly gone. The imagining of youth and the longing of middle age have dissipated, and now I mostly hear only the low, happy hum of the moment.To extend this perfect French afternoon, I order the dessert, the café gourmand, three sample desserts on one plate avec un café noisette. No decisions to be made, no dessert you wish you had had instead. You have what you want, all of it, right there in front of you.Moving into my chronological mind and body has meant letting the Planning Monster meet her inevitable demise. I imagine her like a kind of Gollum—hairless, naked and hideous, shriveled up and dying beside a desert rock. Without feeling the grip of continually, obsessively, looking forward, I now look around slowly, take in the soft light, and move, moment by moment, into that unknowable, and therefore, perfect future. That “something that never arrives” of my 18-year-old Thomas Wolfe-infused consciousness has arrived. I step easily, willingly, onto the train that will rumble down the tracks. Whether the train hits something head-on or arrives at its scheduled destination on time, I hold tightly to my ticket, riding to the end.