Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself.

Clay had tenure, and Amanda had the title of director, but they did not have level floors and central air-conditioning. The key to success was having parents who had succeeded.

What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

The shop was the same as all locations of a chain tend to be, but wasn’t that comforting? The signature colors, those dependable brown napkins—always a stack in the car for blowing winter noses or mopping up spills—the green plastic straws, the heavyset devotees paying seven dollars for cream-topped milkshakes in cups the size of athletic trophies.

“There’s something happening.” Wasn’t this the plot of Six Degrees of Separation?

He wasn’t going to say “They all look the same to me,” but there was some evidence, actual biological, scientific evidence, that people were more adept at recognizing people of the same race. Like, it wasn’t racist, was it, to admit that one billion Chinese probably looked more like one another to him than they did to one another.

modern life had an uncanny tempo, one man was never meant for. Cars and planes made time travelers of all of us.

Mom would have got a kick out of her mocha-colored great-grandsons, made of the genetic issue of Clara’s brother, James, who did something in Silicon Valley. The boys looked just like both of their mothers, something you’d not have thought possible, but there it was, in black and white, ha ha ha.

“So, what do you think it is?” She didn’t want to be humored. G. H. knew her. It had been decades! “I think it’s something we’re going to laugh about when we hear what it was. That’s what I think.” He didn’t think this. But it was right to lie sometimes.

The quotidian sounds of morning: water in pipes, someone else’s footsteps, a conversation from another room.

Not the steady basso of a phone ready to be dialed; the dirge that told you the thing was already dead.

boys who would turn out handsome and therefore catered to, the girls who would turn out pretty and therefore cruel, the rich ones who would become Republicans, the rich ones who would become drug addicts, the rich ones who would exceed their parents’ expectations of them, the poor ones who would prosper and the poor ones who would skulk from Princeton back to East New York.

ROSE TURNED THE SECRET OF THE DEER OVER AND OVER, AS you would a hard candy on your tongue.

He had a fleeting desire for the clarity of a cold Coke, to shake off the vague hangover.

Clay looked at his phone. Habit was powerful. It showed him nothing. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then got back into the car. The brain was a marvel. You could drive without wholly thinking about driving.

He pulled onto the dusty shoulder and turned the car around and drove in the direction from which he’d come. Now nothing looked familiar, though he’d just driven through it. It was all inverted, and he noticed things on the left side of the road that he’d missed when they had been on his right:

“My kids rely on their phones to tell them how the weather is. To tell them what time it is, everything about the world around them, they can’t even see the world anymore but through that prism.”

He didn’t spell it out for her because he knew Ruth and knew she’d understand: if they weren’t human, in this moment, then they were nothing.

“I didn’t know what to do. I can’t do anything without my phone. I’m a useless man. My son is sick and my daughter is missing and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do right now in this moment right here, I have no idea what to do.”

You told yourself you’d be attuned to a holocaust unfolding a world away, but you weren’t. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.