The Future

by Naomi Alderman

“OK. Enoch used to say, ‘The city is a marked environment.’ Like a marked deck of cards. Fixed so we can read it easily. Filled with symbols. Paving slabs are for walking on—blacktop is for cars.” She pointed around the hall to the cup sign over the café, the signs for the restrooms. “Symbols for food, drink, empty your bladder. And look, the real world’s not like that. The world doesn’t exist for our convenience; it doesn’t talk in our language. The wilderness doesn’t have symbolic drawings to tell you where to find food or where it’s safe to take a piss. Where you find a sign in the real world, it’s a sign made by the thing itself: deer tracks are made by deer hooves. Do you see? It’s done something weird to us to live in this human-made, human-centric space all the time. It’s made us more selfish, but also more anxious, and more depressed because we think everything’s about us. I think Enoch was right about that.”