Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [17]
And no fish, needless to say. None left in all that dirty water sloshing around in the oceans and through the remains of what used to be New York. If you’re really loaded you can go diving there, for your vacation. Travel by airlock. Plunge into the romance of a bygone age. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. No more street crime. Think of it as a plus.
Back to the topic of food, which will always be of interest. What will we have for dinner? Is it wall-to-wall bean sprouts? Apart from the pallid garnishes and the chicken-hearted horsd’oeuvres, what’s the main protein?
Think of the earth as a nineteenth-century lifeboat, adrift in the open sea, with castaways but no rescuers. After a while you run out of food, you run out of water. You run out of everything but your fellow passengers.
Why be squeamish? Let’s just say we’ve learned the hard way about waste. Or let’s say we all make our little contribution to the general welfare, in the end.
It’s done by computer. For every birth there must be a death. Everything’s ground up, naturally. Nothing you might recognize, such as fingers. Think of the earth as a hard stone ball, scraped clean of life. There are benefits: no more mosquitoes, no bird poop on your car. The bright side is a survival tool. So look on it.
I’m being unnecessarily brutal, you say. Too blunt, too graphic. You want things to go on the way they are, five square meals a day, new plastic toys, the wheels of the economy oiled and spinning, payday as usual, the smoke going up the chimney just the same. You don’t like this future.
You don’t like this future? Switch it off. Order another. Return to sender.
My Life as a Bat
1. REINCARNATION
IN MY previous life I was a bat.
If you find previous lives amusing or unlikely, you are not a serious person. Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree?
Consider also: previous lives have entered the world of commerce. Money can be made from them. You were Cleopatra, you were a Flemish Duke, you were a Druid priestess, and money changes hands. If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.
In the previous-life market, there is not such a great demand for Peruvian ditch-diggers as there is for Cleopatra; or for Indian latrine-cleaners, or for 1952 housewives living in California split-levels. Similarly, not many of us choose to remember our lives as vultures, spiders or rodents, but some of us do. The fortunate few. Conventional wisdom has it that reincarnation as an animal is a punishment for past sins, but perhaps it is a reward instead. At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.
Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat.
2. NIGHTMARES
I have recurring nightmares.
In one of them, I am clinging to the ceiling of a summer cottage while a red-faced man in white shorts and a white V-necked T-shirt jumps up and down, hitting at me with a tennis racquet. There are cedar rafters up here, and sticky flypapers attached with tacks, dangling like toxic seaweeds. I look down at the man’s face, foreshortened and sweating, the eyes bulging and blue, the mouth emitting furious noise, rising up like a marine float, sinking again, rising as if on a swell of air.
The air itself is muggy, the sun is sinking; there will be a thunderstorm. A woman is shrieking, “My hair! My hair!” and someone else is calling, “Anthea! Bring the stepladder!” All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some concentration and it’s hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar. There is a smell of dirty bathmats