Future Home of the Living God(19)
“Mother Earth has a clear sense of justice. You fuck me up, I fuck you up.”
I look at him, skeptical.
“That’s not what I meant,” I protest. But he just nods. Of course, he doesn’t know how personal this is for me.
Sera looks annoyed with both of us, but she addresses me. “Who said that about love, the pope?” She has despised every pope, even this one.
“No,” I say, “me. There’s no official reaction yet from the Vatican.”
“Your pope will come through,” says Glen. “He’s such a mensch.”
“Mensch? Forget it with the irony, Glen. That unmenschenable will deny it all or declare it’s God’s will.”
“Maybe it’s God’s will,” I say, just to get a rise.
“And maybe this is just humanity’s biggest challenge,” says Sera. “We should invest in one of those genetics companies. They’ll try to turn this thing around with gene manipulation. It will be big.”
We turn back to the screen, riveted by some paleontologist, whose book jacket with the title Deep Time flashed briefly on the screen as he spoke.
“We do not have a true fossil record of human evolution,” he says, “or any other species’ evolution for that matter. What we have are bits and pieces that have survived and surfaced over millions of years. Millions! That’s like playing 52 pickup with one deck of cards flung over the entire planet and expecting to come up with a full and orderly deck. So if evolution has actually stopped, which is by no means fact, it is only speculation, and if evolution is going backward, which is still only an improbable idea, then we would not see the orderly backward progression of human types that evolutionary charts are so fond of presenting. Life might skip forward, sideways, in unforeseen directions. We wouldn’t see the narrative we think we know. Why? Because there was never a story moving forward and there wouldn’t be one moving backward. The monkeys gaining upright posture, for instance, losing body hair, the cranium enlarging. No. We might actually see chaos. We might roll back adaptation through adaptation, the way canines will revert to type left on their own until they reach a wild dog-slash-wolflike status. Or we might skip straight to a previous hominin. . . .”
“Which would be?” Sera turns to us wide-eyed as the station breaks for a car commercial.
“Homo erectus, perhaps.” I have of course been paging through whatever I could find on the subject. “Or maybe Homo neanderthalensis.”
I was really hoping for the latter, but it turns out their DNA is mostly different from ours, and we don’t have much of it. They married in, got absorbed, but who they were is still mysterious.
“And then there’s Australopithecus, anamensis, or afarensis. There’s Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis—”
“Dear god,” Sera mourns, her voice breaking, “there goes poetry, there goes literary fiction, there goes science, there goes art.”
“Cave art was exquisite,” says Glen. There is silence, but he takes a deep breath and forges gently on. “We have no idea of the capacity of our ancestors to think and feel. Perhaps they’ll be intelligent.”
Sera turns on him with an agitated yelp and flings the yarn aside. The needles clatter across the floor.
“I can’t believe you, Glen! You’re PC even about the foraging apes our species may become in only a few generations.”
She speaks sharply, but she is looking at Glen in a pleading way that slowly becomes alluring. They are already drawing close in this crisis, and I decide to leave them alone. I walk out to the kitchen, pour a glass of antibiotic-free milk, and drink it looking out at the bursts of zinnias, daisies, lythrum, and digitalis in the yard—they still look normal, no change in their colors yet. This is an unusually cool day for August, which means it is only ninety degrees. A hot breeze stirs the heavy weight of leaves in the sycamores that line our street. I try not to think of how my parents are contending with the crisis; they have always had a hot sex life, and as a child I knew more about it than I wanted to. Glen and Sera didn’t believe in shutting up and although their bedroom is on the farthest end of the second floor, away from mine, our house is old and their warm kittenish cries, their weeping, and what sounded sometimes like hard work, even furniture moving or séance-table dancing, traveled through the ductwork. When they took matinee naps together, I ravaged the kitchen, just as I am doing now, knowing that Sera would emerge from their bedroom and waft downstairs looking blurred and peaceful. She wouldn’t yell at me. She would clean up after me and cook something solid, maybe her usual Sunday vegetarian lasagna, which we would eat at the wide old antique table that had actually spent a previous life in a nineteenth-century Irish pub. They’d fallen in love with it in a Galway antique store and had it shipped over. My parents are both lawyers. Sera, who was a nurse-midwife before she went to law school, represents home birth, doula, midwifery practices, and other community-based health-care concerns, and Glen is an environmental lawyer. They rely on substantial trust funds, which they shifted to bonds way back before the technology stock bubble burst the second time, then shifted out again, into real estate, then flipped their houses just before the last housing crash. Which is to say, they are shrewd as only market-based-society suspicious trust-fund liberals can be.
I want to tell them about you so much, but I am having trouble, and it isn’t that I don’t think they’d understand. For instance, there is that letter Sera gave to me with an earnest right-mindedness. The Songmakers even said they would be willing to visit my reservation family—which of course they did. I haven’t fully explored why, and now is not the time, but I haven’t forgotten. Anyway, Sera and Glen have always supported my explorations of identity. I know they would embrace and support me now. But they’re overeager about some aspects. They want a piece of Native pie and I don’t really have any pie at all. I just have you.