Fall or, Dodge in Hell

This venture into the New Eschatology was cut short by their arrival in the small northwest Iowa town that the Forthrasts came from. And for people accustomed to the gradual penetration of vast cities, from the airport inward, arriving in that sort of town was jarringly abrupt. Suddenly they were just there—as there as they were ever going to get. The town had a central square: a single block planted in grass, with a vaguely medieval stone tower rising from the middle, and, flanking it, a statue each for veterans of the Civil and the Great Wars. A couple of huge deciduous trees cast shade over roughly circular areas, but the scattering of moms who had convened here to let their kids run around preferred to hang out under a shelter where they could sit at picnic tables. Across the street on one side was a courthouse and police station in rustic Victorian sandstone, with a broken clock in its central tower. Two sides formed an L-shaped district of indolent businesses. The fourth side was residential. Thirty seconds earlier they had been driving through cornfields, and if Sophia hadn’t piloted the Land Cruiser into one of the angle-parking spaces along the square, they’d have been back in the corn thirty seconds later. “Leg stretch,” she announced, “and I’m gonna turn off my cloaking device just so these people know what to make of us.”

They had drawn curious looks from the moms in the park and some old-timers in a barbershop near their parking space. But, at a rough guess, half of the locals were wearing glasses, not merely to correct their vision but to fortify everything with data. Grandma Alice had liked to repeat an old joke that in a town like this, you didn’t need to use your turn signals because everyone knew where you were going. It had become less and more true since she had died. Less because cars now made up their own minds as to when the blinkers should be put on, and more because you really could know everyone’s business now, in a way that the small-town busybodies of Alice’s generation could only have aspired to. The open and trusting culture of communities such as this one had carried over to the digital age. If you had a ten A.M. appointment with the physical therapist, everyone in town could know as much by checking your calendar, which could be accomplished just by looking hard enough at a widget floating above the car that was driving you there. Consequently, cars in a town like this, when seen through glasses, looked somewhat like old-timey sailing ships festooned with signal flags and aflutter with banners.

This all had to do with editors. If you were the kind of person who was enrolled at Princeton, you tended to speak of them as if they were individual human beings. The Toms and Kevins of the world, and most of the population of this town, were more likely to club together and subscribe to collective edit streams. Between those extremes was a sliding scale. Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information. For way less money you could buy into a fractional scheme, which was still very much a rich-person thing to do but worked okay for the 1 percent as opposed to the 0.001 percent. That was about where Sophia, Phil, and Anne-Solenne sat. Julian was stuck with his family’s editor until such time as he went out and made a pile of money. Had he been unable to afford even that—had he been a full-ride financial-aid student—Princeton would have supplied him with a fairly decent editor as part of the same package that gave him room, board, and a library card. It paid off for the university in the long run not to have its less well-heeled students disgorging flumes of sensitive data into the public eye.

Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates—who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.

The more important and high-judgment role played by her editor was to look at any data coming the other way—sound and imagery captured by her glasses, for example—and make sure it never found its way into the wrong hands. Which basically meant it never went anywhere at all.

Maybe a few times a year, Sophia actually talked to her editor. This was one of those times. “I authorize you to put me in Family Reunion Mode for twenty-four hours,” she said.

“Okay,” replied her editor with an It’s your funeral intonation, combined with a light overlay of I hope your mother doesn’t kill me.

Anne-Solenne, Phil, and Julian reacted with a mixture of laughs and mock horror as, in their view, Sophia erupted with vivid displays of personal data, like a circus clown solemnly doffing her top hat to reveal a flower arrangement, a trained marmoset, and a confetti cannon mounted to her skull.

The gaffers in the barbershop and the moms in the picnic shelter had seen the Land Cruiser as just an old-school SUV, with no identifying markings save an escutcheon of dead bugs on the grille proving that it had covered much ground since its last wash. At this moment, however, it was lighting up, letting them all know who had just pulled into town and giving them limited, temporary access to Sophia’s social media contrail. But all of that data was being exhibited with the color scheme, texture palette, typeface, UI conventions, and auditory cues—in sum, the art direction—of her personal brand. Before she opened the door of the car to reveal hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and accessories marking her as Not from Around Here, the same had been preannounced, to anyone wearing glasses, by the digital penumbra of Family Reunion Mode.

“Let’s check out the park,” she proposed, “this won’t take long.”

“Yeah—it’s tiny,” Phil said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Sophia chuckled. “I mean, my rellies will be here before you have time to get bored.”

Crossing the street to the park, the foursome would have drawn stares from curious locals, had the curious locals not advanced to more sophisticated technology that enabled them to stare differently, by scanning all that Sophia had just made public. Without discussing it they went straight to the tower in the middle. This was made of the same buff sandstone as the nearby courthouse. It was just a folly, not a real fortification—only two stories high, with an upper deck surrounded by a crenellated parapet. A windowless steel door, painted Parks Department green, bore testimony to generations of bored teens’ fruitless efforts to kick their way in—or, failing that, to attest to who sucked. A plaque next to the door supplied information they’d already seen in their glasses, which was that the tower had been erected by otherwise idle laborers during the Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. This seemed like the kind of historical/political minutia that Princeton kids ought to have heard of, so they all followed the inevitable hyperlink and spent a minute standing there reading about it. It was the sort of basically dead and inert topic that Wikipedia had actually been pretty good at covering, and enough time had passed that AIs had gone over all of this material and vetted it for mistakes.

Once they had got the gist, their attention drifted back to the here and now. Julian and Phil took turns reading the graffiti on the door, a palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation that Sophia’s expensive training had given her all the tools to perceive and to analyze but no weapons to change.

“What is the agenda?” Anne-Solenne asked loudly enough to silence the boys.

“Flowers on graves,” Sophia answered.

“Let’s go then,” Phil said. “Because this place sucks.” It was an index of his social deftness that he managed to announce this in a dry and almost stately manner that nonetheless made it understood that he was channeling the ancestral voices of all the boys who had stood where he was standing scratching imprecations into the green paint with pickup-truck keys.

“It’s of the essence,” Sophia said, “that I be seen doing it.”

“Because, you know,” Anne-Solenne added, completing the thought, “the people in those graves—”

“Are dead,” Julian said, pushing his glasses up on his forehead. “They’re not going to know.”

Something flickered in Sophia’s peripheral vision. She turned her head to see a sport-utility vehicle of the largest class, authentically bug spattered and road dusted, easing into a span of eighty-seven consecutive empty parking spaces. Visual stigmas pasted on it and hovering above it let her know that its sole occupant was Pete Borglund, fifty-six years of age, the second and current husband of Karen Forthrast Borglund, Alice’s eldest daughter.

“One of your rellies?” Phil inquired. Just making polite conversation since the new arrival’s privacy settings were so tatterdemalion that Phil could have traced Pete Borglund’s mitochondrial DNA back to the Rift Valley with a few gestures.

“Yup,” Sophia said.

“Uncle? Cousin?” Julian asked. Not currently using glasses.

“That is the billion-dollar question,” Sophia said.

Phil made the faintest hint of a snicker. Not in any way a mean snicker. More of a preverbal marker to indicate, I have familiarized myself with your tangled family history.

“On the advice of my mother’s attorneys,” Sophia said, “I will not address him as Uncle but as Cousin.”

The others turned their heads to study her face and see whether she might be speaking in jest. She did not give them any clues. Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.

“Sophia!” Pete called as he approached, tactfully avoiding the use of any loaded terms. Pete was a lawyer who had finally succumbed to the inevitable and folded his practice in Sioux City to move here and look after the affairs of John and Alice’s estate—a full-time job given that Alice had died a billionaire.

“Peeet!” Sophia called back, drawing it out in a way that implied more familiarity than was really the case. She had not seen him in five years. She began walking toward him, steeling herself for the awkwardness of the to-hug-or-not-to-hug dance. But some combination of Midwestern stiffness and lawyerly formality carried the day; when they were still ten paces apart, he extended his right hand to shake. He was silver-blond, ruddy, portly, wearing a suit and tie even though he worked alone in a farmhouse. “How’s Princeton treating you?” he inquired. Which could have passed for a perfectly routine conversation starter, but she heard it as his saying, Look, kid, in spite of all that happened, you’re on easy street.

“Well,” she answered, shaking his hand, “and how’s the estate treating you?” A slightly barbed response that he accepted with a forced smile.

“It is a never-ending source of tasks. Comparable to being a farmer in that way, I guess.”

They let go of each other’s hands and took a moment to regard each other. She found it impossible to hate him. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said. “Some of your … cousins and whatnot could take some pointers from you in how to better protect their privacy. I worry over them when they go off to college and people find out who they are.”

Sophia let it pass with a nod. “My friends and I decided to see the country on our way out to the coast. I thought the least I could do was place some flowers on my grandmother’s grave—and on Alice’s.”

There. She’d said it. Her mother’s attorney in Seattle could not have phrased it better.

Pete nodded. “It would be my privilege to drive you there. Or you and your friends can follow me. It’s only about a mile—”

“One point two.”

Pete glanced away, a bit sheepishly.

“I’d love it if you would drive us there,” Sophia said.

Pete heaved a quiet sigh. It was a sigh of relief.

14

Anne-Solenne, Phil, Sophia, and Julian all knew and would have acknowledged that by virtue of being enrolled at Princeton they were members of a globe-spanning, self-perpetuating elite caste. They would all end up making millions or billions unless they made a conscious decision to drop out, and even if they became ghetto-dwelling junkie artists they would do so with an invisible safety net. So Sophia’s friends were almost eerily polite to the locals, starting with Pete Borglund and moving on, as the afternoon progressed, to Karen, to the Mexican-American caretaker at the grave site, and to various shirttail relatives, estate-running functionaries, and local dignitaries who came out to say hello and to accompany them on a tour of the house and of the creek bottom where the Forthrast boys had gone to play cowboys and Indians with live ammunition.

Eventually the visitors were treated to a thoroughly non-ironic dinner at an Applebee’s. A gender-based split materialized at the table—actually two tables pushed together. Sophia saw it happening in real time but, like Pharaoh watching the Red Sea part, was powerless to stop it. She did a passable impression of giving a shit about the lady talk but was close enough to the man end to be a quasi-participant in their conversation. Pete asked a few questions to which he clearly didn’t know the answers, and not in an interrogating way, but just out of curiosity. They were all strangely grateful to be in the presence of someone who was willing to be that vulnerable. Phil and Julian opened up, and so it was that Pete got the general story on how they had come to find themselves in an Applebee’s in northwestern Iowa. The nominal purpose of the journey was to drop Sophia off in Seattle and then swing down the coast to San Francisco, where Anne-Solenne had an internship lined up. After that, Julian would wander down to L.A., and Phil would fly back to New York to spend his summer writing hedge fund code on Wall Street.

Thus briefed on the visitors’ overall plan, Pete began to answer questions from Phil and Julian on how it all worked in this part of the world. The visitors were now thoroughly disoriented. They had barely had time to register their shock over the two-hundred-foottall flaming cross of the Leviticans—which was clearly visible from the Applebee’s—before they had found themselves in this small and apparently stable town that, while a far cry from Iowa City, was definitely a Blue State pocket. It was completely surrounded by Ameristan but it was populated by people like Pete who had a college degree, asked questions, and seemed to be plugged into sane and responsible edit streams. Pete tried to explain it. “People like that,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of the Leviticans’ cross, “claim to believe certain things. But obviously if you spend ten seconds looking for logic holes or inconsistencies, it all falls apart. Now, they don’t care.”

“They don’t care that their belief system is totally incoherent?” Phil asked. Not really asking. Since this much was obvious. Just making sure he was following Pete’s line of argument.

“That is correct.”

“Explains a lot!” Julian said.

“They can go a surprisingly long time without bumping up against reality,” Pete said, “but at the end of the day when a pregnant mother needs a C-section or you can’t get your Wi-Fi to work, or a thousand other examples I could give, why, then you do actually need someone nearby who can help you with that.”

“So you have doctors and dentists in this town?” Phil asked.

“No, they all moved away years ago, but we have practitioners who can help patients get urgent care over webcam, get telerobotic surgery, and that sort of thing. Both men and women, since the Leviticans won’t let male physicians examine female patients. And I could give other examples of the same general thing. Some percentage of their children are gay. Some percentage have an intellectual or artistic temperament. Those kids need a place to go. Ames and Iowa City are far away. So they find their way into town, move into abandoned houses, and live their lives. Now, if you ask the guys who are up on that hill building that cross, they’ll quote Leviticus at you concerning gay people. But a lot of them have a child or a nephew or a cousin who’s gay and who is hanging out in this town minding their own business.”

“It’s an accommodation, you’re saying. Unspoken, unwritten.”

Pete nodded. “It’s not just that it’s unspoken. It’s that it can’t be spoken of.”

At Pete’s invitation they ended up lodging at the farmhouse, paired up in two of the upstairs bedrooms. These bore faint traces of refurnishings, rewirings, recarpetings, and rewallpaperings beyond count. The most recent wave had apparently been aimed at getting the place back to some kind of historical condition thought of as pure: hardwood floors reexposed and finished, layers of paint scraped off the heavy door trim, wallpaper stripped all the way down to the original horsehair plaster, light fixtures and doorknobs that had either spent most of a century piled in a hayloft or been painstakingly manufactured to look that way. Sophia didn’t have the talents or the sensibilities of a decorator, but she knew her critical theory, and as she lay awake on the iron bunk bed—now upgraded with an extra-firm Gomer Bolstrood mattress that had probably been slept on all of half a dozen times—she wondered about the way of thinking that held this one particular era of the house’s history to be somehow canonical: the logical end state to which it ought to be returned and in which it then ought to be preserved by the flawed machine of Richard Forthrast’s last will and testament. Between when it had first looked thus and the moment, a few years ago, when it had been returned to the same state, it had passed through who could guess how many intermediate phases of interior decoration. Almost all of these had been devoted to covering up—literally papering over—the simple bare rustic character that had now been expensively reinstated. Probably those decorators—various generations of Forthrast moms—had seen it as embarrassing and had sought to expunge it from their visual environments while spending as little money as possible.

When Karen—Pete’s wife, and now the chatelaine—had been assigning them to beds on the way back from Applebee’s, she had quite naturally and reasonably assumed that Sophia would want to sleep in Patricia’s former bedroom. Patricia had been the only girl in the generation that had included Alice’s husband, John; Sophia’s uncle Richard; and Jake, the straggler, the only one still living. Naturally John and Dodge had bunked in one room so that Patricia could have her own: a small, cozy third-story attic build-out with sloping walls. Upon reaching adulthood, getting married, and discovering that she was infertile, Patricia and her worthless husband had adopted Zula—Sophia’s mother—from Eritrea. The husband had gone on the lam and was no longer spoken of. Patricia had then died young in a freak accident. Zula had been raised by John and Alice, with Richard always hovering around the edges as a favored, cool, transgressive uncle. She’d ended up in Seattle, employed by Richard’s company. They had become close. Thus, when Sophia had been tiny, Richard had been her uncle/granddad. She still had memories of sitting on his lap reading books.

Three years ago, when she had been packing for the move out to Princeton, she had found the tattered copies of the D’Aulaires’ Greek and Norse myths that he had given her shortly before his untimely death. Opening Greek she had found a dried maple leaf, still faintly reddish, and heard the story from her father, Csongor, about how Richard had slipped it in there only minutes before the medical procedure that had killed him. They had taken it to an art store to have it framed under glass, and Sophia still had it among her effects. In sum, to the extent that Sophia conceived of herself as being part of an extended Forthrast clan, it was all about Richard, and about her longing—which would never be satisfied, and never go away—for the relationship she might have had with him.

And so she had requested that Karen Borglund place her, and, by implication, Phil, in the room that Richard and John had once shared. Karen—acting as designated driver since Pete had indulged himself with two flagons of Miller Lite—had given her an amused, knowing look in the SUV’s rearview mirror. “That room still has the original bunk beds,” she warned, with the briefest flick of the eyes at Phil.

“We’ll manage, thank you,” Sophia said. “Did Richard sleep on the top or the bottom?”

“To judge from the graffiti carved into the underside of the top bunk, he slept on the bottom.”

“As befits the younger brother,” Pete threw in, being as puckish as it was possible for a podgy Swedish-Iowan estate lawyer to get.

“Is that graffiti still there?” Sophia asked.

Karen paused before giving the answer, and the back of her neck flushed. “No,” she admitted, “it was on a sheet of what do you call it—”

“Masonite, sweet,” Pete said.

“—that was laid over the—”

“Slats.”

“—and supported the mattress. Which was just foam rubber. The whole thing had gone bulgy with age. I believe we took it to the dump. I can have Manuel hunt around for it.”

“No worries,” Sophia said, “I was just curious.” Earlier her voice had betrayed a little too much eagerness, and now she was trying to walk it back.

“The names of girls,” Pete informed her. “He would, I’m told, become very attached to certain young ladies, and then a breakup would occur for one reason or another, but they stayed on his mind for a long time after. He felt things deeply but didn’t always show it, your uncle Richard.”

After lying awake for a time in the lower bunk, hearing the slats creak as Phil settled into slumber above her, she reached over the edge of the bed, groped for her shoulder bag, and found the little flashlight she kept in an outside pocket. Rolling over on her back, she turned it on and played it over the blank sheet of plywood that had replaced the bulgy Masonite. There was, of course, nothing there except a layer of varnish. The slats themselves bore traces of carved words, but these had been painted over. All traces of Richard, or for that matter of Patricia or John or anyone else, had been expunged from the house. All of the history had been erased in Karen’s earnest efforts to make the house historical.

Later, she got up and padded out of the room. To the embarrassment of Karen, the master bath—originally the only bathroom in the house—was out of commission, as some plumbing was being replaced. So the visitors had been relegated to a sort of gimcrack mini-bath that the father of John, Richard, Patricia, and Jake had shoehorned into a wedge of space under the attic stairs so that he would have a decent statistical likelihood of being able to take a crap in peace. Stepping into it was like time-traveling to 1970. Its autumn-toned daisy Formica countertop, its op-art wallpaper, its light fixture, even its shower knobs were straight out of a Nixon administration Sears, Roebuck catalog. Sophia made herself comfortable on the padded seat of its harvest-gold toilet and reflected that this was probably where Uncle Richard had taken his last piss before walking out the door in 1972 to head for Canada to avoid the draft. Though of course he’d have been standing up. Sitting down, she was looking directly into the door of the shower stall. Its walls were covered in little inch-square tiles with a sort of randomized pattern. The floor had been adorned with peel-and-stick daisies made of some grippy high-friction plastic, to prevent slip-and-fall accidents. They’d been there, silently waiting to perform their assigned task, for sixty years. The color, she guessed, had faded—these were daisies as reinterpreted and geometrically abstracted by one of those acid-dropping hippie artists who made album covers for the Beatles or whatever. Through some fascinating process of aesthetic percolation, they had made their way here of all places in the world. The colors were now pastels, but she guessed they’d started out as primaries.