My dad absentmindedly picks crumbs off the tablecloth and drops them in a tiny pile in front of him. He doesn’t look at anyone. One by one, methodical, meticulous, he gathers the crumbs.
“We need to be careful here,” my dad says. “Every family has its own . . . dynamic. Its unique way of handling conflict and crisis. A kind of evolutionary adaptation to its peculiar domestic environment. When you get to the point we’re at, four adults, experienced with one another’s quirks, that dynamic is fairly stable. Otherwise you don’t get to where we’re at. You get divorce. You get estrangement.”
He rakes the pile of crumbs with his fingers, forming an equilateral triangle.
“But there are events in the life of a family,” he says, “just like there are events in the life of a species. Extinction-level events. Cataclysms. And you really don’t know if the dynamic that’s gotten you through so much can handle more than just conflict and crisis. That it can handle cataclysm.”
He uses the edge of his palm to shift the triangle of crumbs into a square.
“Our family dynamic works for us,” he says. “There are jokes and irony and snark. There is occasionally unguarded sentiment. But it’s usually layered with jokes and irony and snark in some sort of emotional tiramisu. I just need us to take this seriously. Because there are things even the closest family can’t survive. And we are not the closest family. Mostly because, John, you’ve always held yourself distant. That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation.”
My dad continues his crumb geometry, squeezing the pile from a square to a circle. He runs his middle finger around the edge, evening it into proportion.
“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That’s all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It’s always open to revision. Yesterday’s fact is today’s question and tomorrow has an answer we don’t know yet. What I’m saying is, I believe what you’re saying. Insofar as you believe what you’re saying. I just don’t want you to do anything . . . rash. To try to prove to us something that seems essential to you. Please don’t keep us outside this.”
He scrapes the circular pile of crumbs off the table into his open palm. My dad looks at me, nods, and carries the crumbs into the kitchen to throw them in the trash can under the sink.
91
Greta lies on the couch, eyes closed. I figure she’s asleep, but she’s not done yet.
“I just find the whole concept a little disingenuous,” Greta says. “I don’t know, I guess I expected more from you.”
“More from me . . . how?” I say.
“It’s not that I don’t get it,” she says. “I get it. We’re the dystopia. We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia. It’s not a totally garbage idea. It’s funny-ish. It’s just that fundamentally your so-called utopia is more of the same crap. This idea that we’re in control of the world. When, in fact, all of our attempts to take control of the world and make it do what we want it to do have been, like, abject failures. The world didn’t become a total shit hole because we don’t have enough control over it. It became a total shit hole because we tried to control it.”
“Greta,” I say, “what does that have to do with anything we’re talking about?”
“It’s the lie we tell each other all day, every day,” she says. “If we can just keep going, make our technology good enough, we’ll solve all the world’s problems, we’ll be able to clean up the mess we made, and everything will be perfect. No more pollution or war or inequity or blah blah blah. And it’s bullshit. The world was not given to us to control. We’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we can control it. But we can’t! In fact, our attempts to control it are what have brought life on this planet to the brink of extinction. And it just pisses me off, these fucking sci-fi allegories where, you know, if we just stick with the plan, we’ll fix it all and live in a futuristic paradise. When, actually, our one chance at saving our only home in the universe is quitting the plan. Because the plan is intrinsically flawed. Human beings are incapable of controlling the world, and believing otherwise is making everything permanently worse. So, I’m sorry, I’m not a literary critic or whatever, but I think you should come up with a better idea for a novel.”
“So, you think I’m psychotically deluded and I came up with a lousy book idea?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“You say you know me, Greta, better than anyone, and you probably do. So, you tell me, am I the brother you’ve known your whole life? Or is something different?”
“Something’s different,” she says. “And the thing that bugs me the most about all this bullshit is that I really like this new you. You’re, I don’t know, here in a way you usually aren’t. You’re paying attention. To me. To Mom and Dad. You’re listening to us. You haven’t checked your cell even once. That thing you do when we’re talking where your eyes glaze over and I just know you’re thinking about work or, I don’t even know what, anything other than actually engaging with me, I haven’t seen you do it once all night. I don’t want to like you like this, you dick.”
Greta sits up on the couch, glaring at me as she points to Penny.
“And don’t get me started on the sexy bookworm over here,” she says. “I mean, you finally bring someone home, someone I might even like, and then you sabotage the whole night in the most epic way possible . . .”
“I wish this wasn’t how we’d met, Greta,” Penny says. “But you should know your whole family is amazing. When my family gets together, we talk about nothing. Any thirty-second segment of tonight’s conversation would automatically be the most interesting thing my family has ever discussed.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Greta says. “Another way of looking at it is that everything I’ve ever known and loved seems to be teetering on the edge of something dark and cold with very sharp teeth that never let go when they bite. So, I find it a little less interesting and a little more fucking scary.”
92
My dad goes to bed. Greta decides to pass out in what was formerly her bedroom and is now the rarely used guest room. Penny goes to the bathroom. My mom takes me by the arm, firm, and leads me into her office, closing the door.
“I suffer from depression,” she says. “I’m on medication. Lexapro.”
“Does Dad know?” I say.
“Of course he knows,” my mom says. “It’s not a secret.”
“Then why don’t I know?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she says.
“What’s the subject?”
“That depression can be hereditary.”
“Mom,” I say.
“A child with a parent who suffers from it, I mean clinically, is three times more likely to have it too,” she says.
“I’m not depressed,” I say.
“That’s what I said for twenty-five years. I have a crossed wire in my brain, John. I’ve been doing my best to uncross it my whole life. I’m sorry that I gave it to you. But if you feel deep down that you don’t deserve happiness, you need to understand that feeling is an illness just like cancer and malaria and the flu.”
She starts to tear up. And it doesn’t matter if I’m a time traveler or a nutcase or just a guy with a headful of bad chemistry—it still hurts to see my mom cry.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll get myself checked out. I’ll talk to someone. I’ll do whatever it is you do when you want to know if you’re depressed.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“After I get back from San Francisco.”
My mom closes her eyes and a mosaic of nonverbal reactions flutters across her face. When she opens her eyes and looks at me again, it’s with compassion.
“It’s normal, you know?” she says. “To feel like a fraud.”
“What?”