Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.

They were all that mattered to him, but of course they didn’t really understand that, because such was the parental contract.

They’d both been subject to that humiliating inversion: watching, gleaning, imitating, like toddlers playing at dressing up. Once you were past a certain age, this was how you learned—you had to master technology or be mastered by it.

They’d all heard, she knew, that those storms of the century were going to be storms of the decade. That there might have to be a new category introduced to accurately describe the kinds of storms, now that humankind had so altered the ocean.

Ruth told the children there were more pool floats in the garage. They returned with sagging plastic mini Oldenburgs.

Ruth bit into a baby carrot. She felt light. Maybe some part of her remembered reading once that people with fatal diagnoses entered a period of remission, calm, almost good health, once that’s been established. A honeymoon. An interlude of joy.

Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux?

Their bodies knew what their minds did not. Children and the very old have this in common. Born, you understand something about the world. That’s why toddlers report conversing with ghosts and unnerve their parents. The very old begin to remember it, but can rarely articulate it, and no one listens to the very old anyway.

“He said to me, ‘We’re all machines.’ That’s it. You get to choose the nature of the machine you are. We’re all machines, but some of us are smart enough that we get to determine our programming.” What he’d said: Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything. You can either calibrate yourself to that or think you’ve rejected it. But the latter, Stephen Johnson said, was a delusion. You were either going to get rich or not. You only had to choose. Stephen Johnson and he were the same kind of person. He was who he was—patriarch, intellect, husband, collector of fine watches, first-class traveler—because he’d chosen to be. Amanda was lost. They were talking around each other, not to each other. “You must love what you do.” Did he care about it, or had he come to care about it, as the spouses in an arranged marriage find, over time, a transaction settled into something like affection?

After the genocide, beauty parlors helped Rwandans cope. Touching another human being was a curative.

She looked down at the countertop, noticing, maybe for the first time, the beautiful abstraction of stone. It didn’t seem strong or solid, but it did seem newly beautiful. That was something.

Maternal muscle memory was strong.

People kept calling the Amazon the planet’s lungs. Waist-deep water was lapping against Venetian marble, and tourists were smiling and taking snapshots. It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart. That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse.

Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.

It felt insincere, to return a declaration of love. An echo was just a trick of physics. She felt free.

The only things a person ever wanted were food and home.

You could feel you owned them, though no one could ever claim to own a tree.

Did the stars make him feel small? They did not. He already knew he was small. That’s how he’d got rich. He just said her name, nothing more.

They let their eyes adjust, and they could see another flamingo, no, two, no, three, no, four, no, five, no, six. Strutting on the lawn with their backward gait. Bobbing and sinewy. Two of the birds took flight as birds do: balletic. Lift over the fence, touch down in the water. They dipped their heads below the surface. Did they imagine it held food? There was a disarming intelligence in their eyes. Their wings were wider than you’d think. At rest, they held those so close to the sack of their bodies. Unfurled, though: they were majestic. Their beauty was astonishing. Logic fell away.

Every action had an equal and opposite reaction, and there were more actions and reactions than could be counted on the party’s eight hands. What their government was up to, what other governments were up to; just an abstract way of talking about the choices of a handful of men.

G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise.

George did not trust the place. If he’d had a cardiac event, he’d have paid the three thousand dollars for a helicopter lift back to Manhattan, where people took on faith the humanity of black people. This place was not good enough for him, beautiful as it was. Here, people were suspicious, resentful of and beholden to the rich, the outsiders.