They married once she had graduated and he had finished his Ph.D. Nine months later, they had a boy, Jody, while Marla was getting her master’s in Human Development and Psychology and Preston was teaching at Stony Brook and already beginning his work toward the Artificial Village project. For five years, life was better than anything Preston could have ever hoped for, better than anything his parents had ever prepared him to expect.
And then, one night in the dead of winter, Marla and Jody were driving back from the grocery store and she lost control of the car and slid off the road, flipping over and hitting a tree. Both Marla and Jody were dead before Preston even received a call about the accident. And, as if he was three years old again, he felt the certainty of disaster, the impossibility of uninterrupted happiness. He felt every single good thing in his life evaporate into the atmosphere and he was left with his theories about family that, now, made absolutely no fucking difference to him. His family was gone. He did not need a village any longer. He needed to be alone, to let the pain seep into him. It was as deep a depression that he could imagine a human enduring, always shocking to discover that there seemed to be no bottom to it. He left the Artificial Village project, stopped appearing on TV shows and in magazines, and simply cocooned himself within his empty house, a house that creaked and settled in the middle of the night and woke him from uneasy sleep; and he was always surprised, no matter what his childhood training had prepared him for, to discover that he was all alone.
It was midnight when they had finished and now, to Dr. Grind’s right, was a stack of fifteen potential families. They anticipated that, even with all the screening they’d done, a number of these families would refuse the offer once they heard the specific conditions, but they were optimistic. The complex, which felt quiet and empty with only the four of them wandering through the main building, would soon fill up with people, with children, and their real work could begin.
Unable to sleep, still burning off the anxiety of their decisions, the four of them walked around the enclosed courtyard of the complex, the stars shockingly clear in the sky.
“How many families do you really think will say yes?” Jeffrey asked Dr. Grind.
“All of them,” he replied.
“Seriously,” Jeffrey said.
“Maybe a dozen,” Preston finally offered, an optimistic number but he felt he had to combat some of Jeffrey’s inherent pessimism for the project’s future.
“We should take a bet,” Kalina offered. “Dr. Grind says a dozen. I say ten. Jill?”
“Eight, maybe?” Jill offered.
“Three,” Jeffrey said, his voice flat with certainty.
“If there are only three families,” Dr. Grind said, “then I won’t need any fellows to help me.”
“Okay,” Jeffrey then said. “Four.”
They walked the length of the complex. The AstroTurf that covered the buildings, so vibrant and whimsical in the daytime, felt like a living, breathing organism in the dark. They sat on benches situated around one of the three playgrounds, the ground soft and rubbery with a special polymer made to lessen the impact on children’s bones while playing.
“I just have to ask one more time,” Jill said. “We definitely aren’t going to allow pot within the complex?”
“Not again,” Jeffrey said.
“It just seems like maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if people were allowed to smoke a joint every now and then.”
“When you say people, who do you mean exactly?” Kalina asked her.
“Not just me,” Jill replied. “I’m sure others will wonder the same thing.”
“No drugs,” Preston said, again. “This is a scientific endeavor. It’s not some hippie commune.”
“Sometimes it feels like it,” Jill said, and the rest of them sat in silence, considering the truth of this statement.
For Preston, this had been one of the guiding principles of the study. The Infinite Family Project would focus on communal parenting, but he wanted to remove the ideological stumbling blocks that had hampered so many American communes in the past. No religion, no “back to the land” ecological bent, no sharing of sexual partners. He had, in several interviews, stated that this would be a true experiment in communal parenting, but the goal was not to isolate themselves from the outside world. Eventually, he asserted, the parents and their children would be returned to society, stronger than they would have been otherwise, not broken by the failure of the communal experience. He had no idea, truth be told, if any of this would actually work.