2040: A Fable (eBook)

Chapter One:

Divine Splendid Isolation

George was a reflective man, a thinking man.

George understood that winter is survived by the vain, the honest, the militant, the self-deceiving, the naïve, or the fragile and sincere. God was good to a range of peoples.

For George, life was all a magical battle between thought and event, truth and lies.

Yet winter remains hard on all types of humans, he observed, as evident each year in this neighborhood. Their survival was as much about luck and persistence as it was about likely selection or preservation of the saints. You may have strong first principles on how you run your family, enjoy your friends. You may believe in what matters.

Yet winter will test those principles like a tyrant.

The First Three Weeks of January

George would ready himself for winter with a pile of books near. Walt Whitman’s self-absorbed charm; Emerson’s smart rankings on freedom and fate; contemporary books since the 2030s, but only if they had something foundational to say about the human soul. He adopted, in winter, his mother’s habit of cracking sunflower seeds to appease some of the anxiety found in his face and jaw.

Because George was raised poor, there was a quiet desperation in him. His Puerto Rican foster brothers taught him the better word desperado. It rhymed with tornado, so he felt it a more incisive word. To George desperation sounds too Ivy League, too much like the nose-in-the-air folks. Desperado—that is the word to describe George to date.

No matter how rich he became, not matter how secure, how much loved, he woke with the fears of Job, certain some new acquaintance was close to the devil. This unsteadiness came with his sense of the virtues and the vices. His wife, of Sicilian descent, could imagine a crown of thorns above his spine—and she would massage at night his weary neck, saying: “It must be hard, George, keeping up such a big head all day long.” They would laugh together, ready to cuddle.

“You have a stupid mouth sometimes,” Varlissima warned. He would think about that for a decade, and write a book about it. She encouraged him to do more and say less. Even though he tried to remain stoic, and silent, and listen to what others had to say, he had an irrepressible native exuberance in his bones. He was a reflective man, and less and less a stoic man.

Polish peasant-made people are sometimes like this. Feeling like he had ascended into a world far higher than ever imagined, it was hard for George to assume that mask of silence for long. By afternoon, after writing at his desk, he was the big mouth again. “Big shot, big shit,” his grandmother warned many decades before.

Much went flying by in George’s mind each morning, stimulated by fine coffee and captivity. Most of the scenes of his youth were so brutal they were over in thirty seconds; but the new George, the older George, could afford to ruminate.

Winter in Saratoga is relentless: icy, stern, long. The first three weeks of January stood still, completely frozen. Ice on all the lovely trees. Slender brittle branches of the younger ones snapped. Pools of black ice on driveways. Ice, shining in the afternoon sun of late January. This was all very strange, strange like the moisture and hot extremes of last summer. Weather patterns in 2040 were more volatile than world markets.

It causes some like Abe, a journalist in the immediate neighborhood, to get mean. It causes George’s lawyer neighbor, Winston, to get philosophical and meaner.

It is almost comical, this distorting effect of winter. Abe once called Tony, another neighbor, “a violent and brain-dead servant of the State.” Yet that was in a January, when most had sludge for brains.

The Origin of Self-reliance

Emotions change as the seasons change, and neighbors become more neighborly. You do not notice this truth, George noted, if you are merely self-reliant. It is in watching the odd pattern of loved ones, measured across the slightest variances, in journals, and in your head, when the truth emerges as a higher set of facts. Emotions change. The seasons change. Neighbors stay near.

This region’s winters teach you self-reliance in the grandest American tradition. The need for self-reliance does not change as you age. Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, the Adirondacks—all icy. Those settling in Saratoga thought they might get a break from the longest of winters, being in the lower portions of the Adirondacks. Yet they were wrong. They were all part of the Northern Kingdom. “We hate the Big Eight in the winter,” George wrote one night, leaving the details to stew.

In winter, you feel for your neighbors, family and friends, as reports of some falling on their asses increase, and as old folks break hips and the Saratoga hospital fills with these broken seniors.

February is when you really feel it. The shadows of each day are long. Memory can overtake experience, some days in winter.

You come to need neighbors, even if they proved mindless on several prior occasions. It is not about the warmth or intelligence of the conversation; it is about human contact.

The endless daily updates on the Virus infections worsened the emotions of winter. Spreading germs this winter made the feeling of isolation heavy for all, from the joys of children to the dreadful days of the elderly. There seemed to be no clear way forward, except to derive local warmth for the closest of near friends.

At his deepest self, George understood he and his family would prevail. Yet at times, it did seem as if he was skipping on a tightrope over a snake pit while juggling thousand-year-old Japanese Kamikoto knives.

Bursts of Dignity

Despite the horrible weather, Varlissima felt lucky to have the two closest, across-the-street neighbors, Tony and Allison. The quartet near the Stone Church assembled four very different and sonorous people. Allison appeared smart, and Tony was clearly important.

Varlissima felt warm towards them instinctively, well before they got to know each other. She felt it with her expressive Sicilian anticipatory warmth. “Hell,” she thought, “if you are part of the neighborhood this long, you pass the test. We like you. Come on in.” Her eyebrows and smile said the same.

George, a social historian, and her husband, cautioned Varlissima about getting too friendly too fast with these neighbors, saying: “My sweet Varlissima, I get a sense from Allison that Tony is holding her like a wolf by her ears.”

There was no proof of this. This was nothing short of pure instinct like a Biblical warning, as George was raised by a born-again mother, and tended to see deeply into the everyday. While Varlissima had bursts of dignity in her days, George was simply ruminating. His father had died early of a traumatic brain injury from war; and George was a thinker as a result. He wanted to think about everything in case he was cheated of life like his father. George said late one midnight: “Hey Varlissima! Please let us give Allison and Tony some time to thaw out before we jump into their lives.”

A Pattern of Distance

For three long years, George and Varlissima watched an athletic Tony and an articulate Allison across the street, raking, planting explosively colorful Dutch hybrid bulbs, which suggested “Hello, come in.” But the toxicity of 2040 had invaded our private lives, so caution prevailed. There might prove a peaceful volley of hellos and goodbyes between them, but nothing of substance. A pattern of distance prevailed.

Tony worked away often, and Allision stayed at home. Allison brought a dignified European feel to this patriotic American neighborhood. This calm prevailed in the Stone Church neighborhood, even though some were aware of the riots and protests in the streets elsewhere in the world.

Across these frigid winters, Varlissima and Allison talked about birds—from across a twenty-foot road—both being attentive birders. From diving ducks on the next-door pond, to cuckoos, and kingfishers, and dignified and insistent piliated woodpeckers—they compared notes across the street on bird citations most weekends. George found all of this warm and amusing, to have these two distinguished college-educated women standing across the street from each other, sharing bird notes.

Before the Age of the Virus, neighborhoods, no matter how poor or how rich, were like bathtubs, very large white bathtubs, where the natures of most people in the neighborhood were known, as they all shared the same water. But these days were days of relentless downloads and hidden secrets.

Like a rare eagle thinking herself a minor hawk, Varlissima seldom disappointed the neighborhood. She was known as the Bird Queen, even in winter. Over time neighbors gave Allison the nickname “The Book Queen.” Both names stuck as obvious as a smear of an insect’s wings on a car windshield.

We all had nowhere else to go because of the pandemic. George and Varlissima felt Allison and Tony orderly, lovely, kind, and attentive. Yet a dusty pattern of distance kept them remote from their closer selves.

Dignity at a Distance

George was a pensive man, walking around the neighborhood. The hours of early morn were his best. “The hours of the wolf,” he called them, alert and strong. He sported a cap, a beard worthy of a monk, and often walked gingerly and slowly into the afternoon...