“Guy on his fifth set of dentures collecting toothbrushes. That’s a good one.”
Skinner grinned. “How you keeping busy besides busting solar panels?”
“Dude, nothing much has changed since you were here last. I do my Tai Chi in the morning and my yoga at night. I reread all of Dickens and am back on a Melville jag. It’s all about supporting the wife’s career. She’s working on a book about the FUS. Trying to spell out once and for all why it went down, who was responsible. Most of the time she’s buried in books.”
“How’d a dumbass like you marry a woman so smart?”
“My thoughts precisely. She could’ve just retired a long time ago but she’s got unfinished business with the FUS. She thinks she did too little to prevent it is my theory. Like she was part of the whole propaganda apparatus that brought on the worst of it. It haunts her. I’ve been trying to tell her to give it a rest, what’s past is past. But she’s too much like you. Has to go over it and over it in her head.”
“An incredible woman. They broke the mold et cetera, et cetera.”
“Roon called here last week.”
“Say what?”
“She wants to get in touch with you and Chiho. I think she wants to make amends.”
Skinner rubbed his face. Audible stubble. “I wasn’t expecting that. Is she okay? Jesus, I’m a shitty father.”
“She sounded good. I talked to her maybe five minutes. She says she doesn’t have your new number. She wanted—I really should wait until Chiho is here to tell you this.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t worry, man, it’s nothing bad. Just wait for the ladies to come back from their little garden tour and all will be revealed.”
Five minutes and five buffalo wings later Hiroko and Chiho came back indoors. Chiho beamed. “Did Carl tell you Roon called?”
“Yeah, he did, what’s—”
Chiho knitted her fingers together and held her hands to her chin. “Roon and Dot have a baby!”
Skinner opened his mouth to say something, stopped, looked to the others to figure out how he should be feeling. “A grandchild?” he said.
“A little boy,” Hiroko said. “He’s two now.”
In this safe place, in the company of people who loved him, bewildered and unable to speak, Skinner found tears trembling at the corners of his eyes.
Now they’d have to see Roon. Their stay would be shadowed by expectation and shot through with giddiness that they’d finally get to meet a grandchild. Skinner shook his head and gazed curiously at his open palms, as though he’d achieved grandfatherhood via some feat of manual labor. Carl suggested they go on a walk.
The path through the woods roughly followed where a sidewalk used to be. Here and there stood foundations of houses. If you kicked at the weeds or peeled back layers of fallen leaves, little artifacts of extinct Portlanders emerged. Bottles, cell phones, plastic toys partially covered in moss, the rusted whorls of a box-spring mattress. Trees had reclaimed the grid, reverting it to chaotic geometries determined by fallen seeds. Chiho loved the birds most, the wild flocks that had replenished themselves post-FUS, blotting the sky in great concentrations of feather, cackle, and wing. A woodpecker smacked its beak against a snag, probing for grubs. Amid a copse of pines rose an old McDonald’s golden arches sign, boasting of billions served. Billions! The husbands and wives walked paired down the path.
Skinner said to Hiroko, “Carl says you’re working on a book.”
“More like the book’s working on me.”
“So what’s your angle on the FUS?”
“I’m considering it by way of a neurological metaphor,” Hiroko said. “I stumbled on some research from the 1950s, two scientists named Olds and Milner who first identified the pleasure centers of the brain. I guess their most famous experiment was when they stimulated the pleasure centers of rats whenever the rats pressed a particular bar in their cage. It didn’t take long for the rats to stimulate their pleasure centers to the point of exhaustion, to the point of not eating or taking care of their other physiological needs. My argument is that in the age of Fucked Up Shit, human beings became like those rats, whacking the bars that stimulated our pleasure centers even as those very bars were what triggered our doom. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, we started to understand the terms of our self-destruction. Our rational minds argued against using fossil fuels, against overeating and too much television, against accumulating too much wealth among too few, but a more powerful part of our brains kept pushing those bars. Push, push, push. The solutions, the ways we might avoid the FUS, were staring us right in the face. It was obvious and apparent: stop using oil, stop making plastic, control the growth of the population to a logical level so we could exist within the parameters of our ecology. If we didn’t do these things, most of us would die. But we were willing to die because a more powerful part of our minds, the old mammalian limbic system, was busy pushing those bars. The more recent, less developed part of our brains, the neocortex, was waving its arms and screaming for us to stop our destructive behavior. In this war between the limbic system and the neocortex, the limbic system won, hence the FUS.”
Carl picked up a stick to walk with. “So by the time we got tangled in the FUS, who were we fighting for exactly?” he said.
“We were fighting for Boeing,” Skinner laughed.
“Yes, but more to the point, we were fighting for the limbic system,” Hiroko said. “We were fighting to keep pushing those bars. When everything collapsed, there were few bars left to push. But now the earth’s renewing itself. Look around us. There are a lot fewer people to make a mess of things. The qputers are undoing the damage.”
“Still, Phoenix gets hotter every year,” Skinner said.
“True,” Hiroko said, “because not every place is recovering at the same rate. It’s going to take some places a lot longer.”
They came to an old intercity light-rail car covered in vines. Through the dirty windows they read advertisements for colonics and undergraduate degrees.
Skinner said, “So you’re saying we fought on the wrong side, Hiroko?”
She shrugged. “In the FUS, everyone was on the wrong side. The very idea of sides was on the wrong side.”
The nocturnal animals of the forest performed their first stirrings as light seeped out of the sky. The path widened and intersected with a hard-packed gravel road. Nearby leaned a bus-stop sign. In a few short minutes a bus arrived, a shambling, multihued contraption furnished with couches and love seats, a kitchenette in the back where a woman cooked a garlicky organic meal. A few other riders, swaddled in patchwork outfits of Gore-Tex and hemp, sat reading alternative weeklies, about them hanging the whiff of weed. The four friends crowded together on a couch across from a balding man in glasses who was absorbed in a battered copy of Benjamin’s Illuminations, a scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that it appeared to be holding his head in place. The bus bumbled along the irregular road and the trees eventually gave way to deliberate landscaping and an actual paved arterial. Soon they were on Burnside through the vital guts of Portland. A block or two from Powell’s City of Books they climbed off the bus and squeezed through an alley to Hiroko and Carl’s favorite Thai place. As they approached the back entrance, a great wave of plates and cutlery crashed through the door and spilled out into the alley. Carried on this wave was a disheveled and quite stoned busboy, and close behind a chef rode a baking sheet like a surfboard, yelling obscenities at his young and now-fired employee.