THE FUTURENESS Ch8: The Future of Real

Xavier stood with his hands on his hips, staring at me through his dark sunglasses.

Interstrike, the real-life version, was closed for business, according to a sign taped to the inside of the box office window. Another sign, a hunk of hewn wood nailed to a wooden post, said in letters burned onto the wood in the style of the game, The Future of Real.

I’d managed to put off talk about playing Radio Kill Report by insisting that Interstrike had to come first. I told Xavier that wandering through a maze whose internet equivalent was simultaneously crowded by millions would be a transcendent experience, that we’d be part of a world-mind, running through this shared bit of mental geography. It was entirely possible more people knew their way around this artificial space than any other imagined on earth. We’d be in the New Mexico desert walking through virtually the same passages that eight and a half million other people were navigating online at the same time. We would feel something, and if it wasn’t art, we would feel something. And we’d get in a little paintball. And I’d get to forget things for a while. The future of real. I needed something larger than myself to pull me back from thinking about the future – the cowboy’s, the Daytonians’, the marred blouses’, the fish entrails, and the crackling, high-band squawk of the future suddenly running out.

Xavier and I hopped the abandoned turnstiles and wandered into the maze. We moved through the beer cans and snack wrapper waste.

“I know you know why I’m here,” Xavier said.

“There’s no other reason for you to come to Dayton,” I said.

“Dayton is your room, and you won’t come out of it. You’re like those Japanese kids, the shut-ins, whatever they were called when they were cared about. You’re never picking up your phone, so I had to come down.”

Xavier walked around two rusting oil drums and ran his hands across a chalky, packed-dirt wall.

“This is exactly as I remember it,” he said.

He took a right turn in the maze. At the far end of a passage a pile of wooden crates sat dry rotting in the sun. Something lay crumpled in the corner – a deflated balloon. I bent down to untangle the twine that ran from the edges of the balloon to a plastic water bottle painted bright yellow. It had a screw-top lid. I opened it and found a roll of paper tucked down inside. I read it out loud.

Greetings from Mrs. Haley’s Fifth Grade Class! You have found one of the helium balloon messages we sent to the New Mexico skies. How far did we fly? Please use this postcard…

The print-out gave details about the school’s location and a number and address where the message could be sent. A date of two years prior was written on the bottom of the paper. Also in the bottle was a photograph of a class like any other class – elementary school children caught just before that branching of the developmental tree when kids begin to look self-consciously at a camera.

“How far did they get?” Xavier said.

“It’s from a school in this district,” I said. “So, they only made it about two miles.”

“Let’s send it in,” Xavier said.

“It says they launched the balloon two years ago,” I said. “The kids have forgotten about it. They made their map and connected their replies with yarn and pushpins, and then they all graduated the fifth grade and moved on.”

“Still, we should send it in. It’d be interesting.”

Two years. I’d been sending out catalogues for three years before the balloon lost altitude near the airport, brought down by jet wash. I thought of the cafeteria, which was getting hooked up with the highway extension around that time. I’d just begun to park in that lot at lunch and recline my seat when the balloon floated by, possibly casting a balloon-shaped shadow across the roof of my car. It was impossible that these years of lunches shared the same time that passed through Mrs. Haley’s room, which I was seeing in fast forward now, the silver discs of gerbils’ wheels spinning in the corner of the room and the maps of subsequent balloon launches flying up, coming down, flying up and being taken down again.

But a year is nothing.

“Let’s not,” I said. “It’d be a disappointment.”

“This attitude is why we need to finish playing Radio Kill Report as soon as possible,” Xavier said.

“I was thinking that there would not be that much future left,” I said when we got back to my apartment and opened two beers. We were watching something on television. Finally, not having to look at each other made conversation easier. Xavier had asked me what I meant when I spoke about the children having moved on into their futures.

“There would be plenty of fictional future, plenty of thinking about the future, making plans, looking forward to the future, but in terms of actual concrete future, that quantity is running out. And what we are going to be left with, I’ve worked out, is going to be something quite different, something like an eternal present. It won’t have a future, and eventually we’ll stop looking for one. And there will be a great war between those who still believe in the future and those who know there isn’t one anymore.”

“You’re stalling,” Xavier said.

“I mean truly and really the future will one day be completely gone. And as the day grows nearer when the future blinks out, the fact that there will no longer be a future will reveal itself to only a few people at a time, slowly, as in a trickle. Those first in line to find out will feel bad, naturally, and will tend to withdraw from things for a little while to sort these thoughts out because they will not be pleasant thoughts, and it will look as if no one around them is sharing these thoughts with them, which will make it all the more isolating.”

“This is the worst allegory I’ve ever heard,” Xavier said.

“I am one of those people,” I said. “I am one of those people who poked their head up, looked around and found out about the future disappearing and went a little haywire.”

“What the fuck. The future’s not disappearing.”

“It’s actually almost gone. Can’t you feel the air going out of it? I can’t believe some people can’t feel it at all. Can’t you feel it a little? When you’re serious, like you said you were at the restaurant, can’t you at those first few moments when you get serious, can’t you at that transition point, getting serious, can’t you see that the future has just about, but not quite, completely melted away?”

“This is all coming from fear,” Xavier said. “You want to believe there won’t be one, or whatever it is you’re talking about, because you’ve – I think you’re sounding like you’re going a little insane. I think this is what it sounds like.”

“We’re nearing the end of the future. Things that increase my belief in this are happening every day now,” I said, thinking of the cowboy and his offering of fish guts in the parking lot and the time-stabbed balloon finally discovered. “These things will increase in frequency. Seeing this has been my job just as much as the sending out of the circulars. The rest of the change will involve the movement of power around places, things and people shuttling back and forth. Air travel will be the last thing to slip out of the future, then it’ll be closed off.”

I thought about the boy in the back of the house truck, devotional music playing behind him.

Xavier looked straight through me and said, “I believe that anything that’s been affecting you, any personal history, any kind of psychological baggage, none of that really matters when we’re predicting whether or not there’s any future for you. I’m just looking at what you do, and based on this technical analysis of your actions, I can make or not make a bet on you.”

“I’m parking at the Golden Apple, I’m following people who steal newspapers from the dispensers, I’m coming to pick you up at the airport. That’s what I’m doing.”

“You’re not returning that balloon message.”

“And I’m not returning the message, that’s right.”

“It’s perverse, not sending that back.”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s like you’re taking something from those kids, a learning experience.”

“Not getting the message back, that’s a learning experience.”

“They should have the experience of knowing that sometimes the messages get lost for a while but eventually meet their person and come back. I’m with you and I’m a person who wants to return the message, so that counts.”

“You’re visiting. You don’t know anything about living here anymore. You don’t know what’s starting here. You don’t count in this scheme.”

“Those children should be spared stumbling into the little craziness you’ve got going.”

“Just let them imagine it went a little farther than the fucking airport.”

I know this place. I know what’s going to happen here, and even if I don’t like it, even if it’s absolutely unbelievable to me that it could happen, I like the idea of at least knowing about it beforehand. Soon, more people are going to forget about the future here in Dayton. This will be just as it is around the rest of the country and the world, person by person cleaning fish over satellite weather maps, and what the world will look like to people like me versus those who still think there is still a future, that’s what’s going to matter.

The rest of the night Xavier attempted to explain put options on crude oil futures, and I avoided questions about myself. Later, in the kitchen, he changed the subject.

“Do you know where your nearest hospital is?”

“Um. Yeah.”

Xavier left the room and then came back carrying his shoulder bag. He reached in and pulled out a pair of oversized scissors with red rubberized eye rings and silver shears. He worked the shears open and rotated his wrist, twisting them under the kitchen light.

“Big scissors,” I said.

“I planned to bring some wicked katana with me, but I went out looking last minute. I don’t know where to buy that gear we used to talk about.”

“Just, at a martial arts store.”

“I don’t know where they are and don’t care. I went to a high-end kitchen supply place near my apartment and picked out a pair of shears. They’re ceramic.” Xavier bounced them in his hands, as though my attention hadn’t already been stabbed.

“I’ll just get a tattoo,” I said.

“I’m thinking something small, just your little finger on your right or left hand, your choice. Not a big deal.”

“We’re going to talk the rest of the night and then I’m going to take you to the airport in the morning. It’s too bad we couldn’t paintball. I’m sorry about that.”

Xavier gave me a pained look. “We have to finish up this game so you can get on with things. Now, I came here because you’re disappearing, and hearing you talk today I can see that happening even more.” Xavier put his hand down on the kitchen counter, shears angled like he was going to start cutting open the air.

“Just put your left little finger in here,” he said, modeling the action with his other hand, “and we’ll do a small chunk. Shouldn’t hurt with those beers in you.”

I became like nothing. I fanned out my left hand and carefully placed my pinky between the blades at the last knuckle. I saw Xavier’s watch, silver-banded and shining like the blades of the shears in the kitchen lighting. He’d had it fixed so the hands no longer ran through all the globe’s time zones but stood still, stuck to our singular course.

In the history of mayhem, it was a minor and trivial and stupid bit of bravado. But with it I was able to lift my head up higher, look around and see what was coming.

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