Ada filled a “go bag,” as the government called it, which was really a nylon pouch she’d been given on an airplane, kept in a closet, and never used. At least it would get her started on her permanent journey next door, away from her family. As she shoved in the travel-sized toothpaste, deodorant and razor she’d saved from other trips, she wondered: What were the best things to bring to the future? How did you pack for the next millennium?
Weeks earlier, it would have been the last thing on her mind. Ada had been too busy trying to integrate, as shrinks called it, changes in her life visited upon her involuntarily.
Her employer, an evolutionary science magazine of which she was managing editor, had lost its funder, an eccentric and civic-minded billionaire who had walked into the ocean as if trying to return to the creature he’d been before becoming human. Ada’s position had been “temporarily” reduced to part-time and remote, separating her by a screen from people she’d enjoyed working with, and eliminating her benefits, the privileges and protections she’d earned over time. Her eighteen-year-old daughter, Jada (subconsciously almost named for herself, Ada only realized when the girl turned sixteen) had fled college, where she was a physics student of prodigious promise, announcing she was overwhelmed and intending to be either a wrestler or a stand-up comic, professions, Ada thought, for which she had never shown any talent. Soon Jada stopped mentioning her future and locked herself in her room, curled, Ada imagined, in a fetal ball of incapacity and dread.
“Do you think,” Ada whispered, on the other side of the door, “you gave it enough time?”
“Yes,” Jada whispered back. “I couldn’t get anywhere. So, I left,” as if she’d run into a blown-up bridge or flooded freeway and had had to turn around.
Ada’s husband, Dotson, was a trusted and well-compensated securities analyst for corporations. Yet Ada’s glance at their joint accounts revealed he had lost untold amounts of money betting on sports from polo to pickleball, which he’d never played or watched, reducing their savings to rubble, as if they were getting rich in reverse.
“I know what we should do,” he said, when Ada asked him about it, casually, for confrontation wasn’t her style, which she now regretted. “Let’s sell off part of the backyard.”
“Why?”
“Because we could use the money, of course,” he said, as if his irresponsibility was a blameless act of God. “Someone could build a house back there. People are going crazy for these lots, to escape the city,” in which tightly packed people had been spreading disease.
“All right,” Ada said, having no better idea. “Let’s sell it.”
Their property, which had been half an acre, now would become smaller and shared, the way people grow up shoved together with siblings and leave to live on their own, only the other way around. The last part of their backyard was auctioned off to a real estate company. Half a foot disappeared from their asphalt badminton court, rendering the space unusable for any existing game: the net drooped as if in despair and was never again raised. Bulldozers shored up ground and removed trees that had been there since their arrival in the suburb fifteen years before and named by Jada as a child.
Ada distracted herself by watching the construction, for she was unused to working at home. It reminded her of being a little girl sitting at her tiny desk, pretending to toil in an ice cream shop, the one place she had understood people got paid, her doll or cat as a customer. She began to take long drives to avoid working, driving idly with the dog in the shotgun seat, no destination in sight.
Soon she saw things she had never known went on in her suburb. Ada passed two men exiting a house, carrying a flat-screen TV, dining room set and running machine, looking too young and poorly dressed to live there, stashing the goods in a crummy, chipped-paint van defaced by grotesque graffiti of private parts drawn in its dust, the smell of marijuana coming in like a cop’s question through the dog’s window. They glared at Ada, as if threatening her not to tell what she saw. She approached a park in which she had only ever watched modest New Year’s Eve fireworks. Today, in its bushes, she saw people fornicate, young women with young men, older men with young women, old women with old women, each couple exposed by a shifting branch or fallen leaves, like weird gifts behind the doors of a giant advent calendar. Animals defecated and urinated on the park’s paths and protected lawns, some with owners, others alone, some as common as dogs and cats, others as exotic as swans and badgers. Going in the direction of home, Ada dodged garbage thrown into the streets by residents not bothering with plastic bags let alone recycling bins, and hurling giant pots of hot soup from windows.
Had her town of Mossy Bend always been this way and she’d never been home enough to know? Or was everything going backwards, using a word from her workplace, devolving?
Ada knew the very concept of “devolution” was controversial or had been when people still trusted science, that is to say an earlier century. To believe it, you had to think evolution had a purpose, was positive progress (progress itself just meaning forward movement, uncolored by morality). And did she? Ada wasn’t sure yet kept her indecision to herself, for the people at her magazine, mostly men, were dismissive.
Turning the final corner to her block, Ada encountered a feathery haze of mist or smoke, which smelled fiery and acrid. Past it, to her shock, Ada saw a house already fully erected in the far end of her backyard, like a castle covered by clouds in a children’s tale. She believed it had only just begun to be built.
Entering her home, Ada called for Dotson but got no reply. Jada’s room was empty and there was evidence of a fast departure after a desperate search: drawers open after being rifled through, jeans piled on the bed, pockets pulled out, empty, and pennies, the least loved of loose change, scattered.
Ada reached the living room picture window and found her husband. He was in a small group in the backyard, a male group, many of whom Ada recognized from card games, cook-outs and cocktail parties in their home. On what was left of their property, a few thousand feet of lawn and three-quarters of a crudely truncated court, Dotson and the others played a new game, which was a combination of several pastimes, football met soccer met tennis, as movie executives would have said. What linked them all was ferocity, even sadism: the men rolled on the ground and gravel, poked, punched and gouged each other, laughing and crying out in pain.
Ada noticed an unfamiliar figure: a lanky, poetically handsome man with sandy hair, as old as forty or as young as twenty-five. He conspicuously held back from the violent actions, appearing politely appalled by them, before making excuses the others barely registered, and stepping away entirely.
When the remaining players lay panting, bruised and bloodied in a break, like wounded soldiers but more stupid, Ada thought, she got up the courage to walk outside. Dotson looked up at her with half-swollen eyes from a puddle on a slight slope.
“Want to play?” he asked, groggily, not meaning it and maybe not even recognizing her.
“No, thanks,” she said, simply, to close the subject.
“By the way, don’t answer the phone.”
“Why not?”
“It’s about the wagering. I’ll explain later,” Dotson said, also insincerely, Ada thought, and also closing a subject.
“Where’s Jada?” she asked.
“She left with someone.”
“She did? With who?”
Dotson shrugged, which clearly caused him great physical pain. Ada didn’t pursue it, though she very much wanted to. Instead, she asked a question to which she thought Dotson might actually know the answer.
“Who was the new man?”
He did know, right away, sort of.
“His name is Torn. Thorn? He said he just moved in.”
“Where?”
Dotson sat up, his elbow in a good fleece sweatshirt stuck in stinking mud. He dipped his head toward the new house in the backyard, an action which hurt him worst of all.
Ada went back inside and learned Jada had returned, locking herself in her room again. When Ada gently knocked, the girl screamed, agonized...
“Not now! I’m fine!”
…and her voice had a new, drug-induced nasality which alarmed Ada. As her daughter fell silent and Dotson rested his raw, wounded body, taped his cuts and iced his bruises, Ada slipped out.
She walked through the backyard, past the destroyed court, into the mist. Her fingers found it had the consistency of spider webs, wet cotton candy, things soft and sticky but thinner, like those strings in the sides of your eyes right before your retina detaches (it had happened to her two years before). When the new house loomed ahead, it, too, had a strange, wiggly quality, like gingerbread, like Playdough, like something made of baking soda and cornstarch. Ada reached a single lighted window and, through it, saw the new neighbor, Torn or Thorn. He wore white T-shirt and shorts, had headphones on, and was dancing by himself. He, too, was willowy and wavy, with longish blonde-ish hair, and beautiful.
Ada rang the doorbell, which was an aria sung in a castrati’s voice. In a second, the door—as heavy as a palace’s—was flung open with little effort by Thorn or Torn. Ada thought he had a big, erection-like nose, thick, potent lips, and brutal yet wistful blue eyes. His face shined with neon perspiration.
“Hi,” he said, the soft leather headphones hung upon and kissing his throat.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” Ada said, more than a little uneasy in his presence.
“Thanks!” he said, guilelessly. “I’m Torn. And you are…”
“Oh, right. I’m Ada. Dotson’s wife.”
Courteously, Torn nodded, clearly unaware of who Dotson or his wife were. Then he came clean.
“I just dropped in to say hello to my new neighbors. Then I got pulled into the game. I was barely introduced.”
“And you left early?”
Torn shrugged, embarrassed or maybe just modest. “I’ll hide behind the lover-not-a- fighter thing, if you don’t mind.”
This was a gentle foam hammer to Ada’s head.
“No,” she said. “I don’t mind. It’s more than all right.”
Torn’s sweat smelled like sugar.
“You live here alone?” she blurted out.
“I do.” He almost joked, almost didn’t. “Is that weird?”
“No.” Ada laughed: he’d made her. “Maybe a little. Not in a bad way.”
They laughed together forever. Then Ada became aware of a smell of an actual cake baking—not Torn or his house. He, too, picked up on it.
“Oh—jeez—excuse me!”
He ran to save it, to make sure it didn’t burn. He was baking a cake. For himself? There was no one else there. He hadn’t known she was coming. But if he had, he would have baked one for her, right? Like the old song?
Ada peered farther in, to see more of the house, already furnished with a weird, disconcerting delicacy. She could make out long, twisting halls, winding like white rivers. Torn never returned, as if he’d retreated into the past. Yet Ada knew that wasn’t the direction in which he was headed. His absence made her feel like crying.
“Torn?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll come back!” she called.
She knew it was impossible, there was no coming back, everything always went forward, the way the next day happened, just like that.
“I’ll come ahead, Torn!” Ada yelled, over her shoulder, returning to the mist.
When she got back home, in her driveway, Jada was being loaded into an ambulance by paramedics. Jostled on the stretcher, her daughter was conscious, responsive, and waved a little to Ada, who—running, panting—came close.
“Don’t worry,” Jada said, the first unsolicited words she’d uttered since leaving school.
“It’s just for observation.”
“Who called them?”
“I did.”
It seemed clear the girl was relieved to be considered incapable and helpless by someone. Ada had apparently been too encouraging.
“I’m coming with you,” Ada said.
“No, don’t!”
“Where’s Dad?” she asked, as Jada disappeared behind the van’s double doors.
“I don’t know!” the girl cried, at the last minute. “But he said not to let anyone in!”
As she was driven away, there was a sense of Jada being sucked back into a womb, and this was what she wanted.
Upstairs, examining the girl’s room, Ada discovered what she assumed was “drug paraphernalia,” as police called it—rolling papers, powders, small balls of tin foil—but she was too innocent to know.
“Hello?”
Ada came to the second-floor landing and looked down. A rough, middle-aged man—shaved head, stained sweatshirt decorated with an embossed obscenity, big gut resting on the belt of baggy jeans—stood in the main floor vestibule. He’d tracked mud all over the cream carpet. Ada hadn’t let him in; she’d simply left the door open.
“Yes?” she asked, both polite and petrified.
“Dustin here?”
“Dotson? Er… no.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Um… I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
This was less a question than a disgusted joke to himself. Before Ada could find the voice to answer…
“Tell him I said this!” the man yelled.
He twice kicked his foot in its muddy boot through the screen door. The second thrust tore the screen from the frame but also left the man struggling to free his foot, stuck in the mesh. Blushing and cursing, he banged the door shut on his way out.
After a pause, Ada heard the basement door creak open and Dotson emerge from his hiding place, under the ground.
The next day, when she plunged back in, was it Ada’s imagination or had the mist or smoke in the backyard gotten thicker? It felt as if she were hacking a machete through a rainforest, with the same sickening humidity weighing down the air. At the end, Torn’s house was on a finish line that had receded since her first excursion and now seemed miles away. Was that even the right unit of measure?
Ada reached the door, even softer than before, as if now the dough of gingerbread before you baked it, dripping and delicious when you secretly scooped up a fingerful and swallowed it, hoping Mommy wouldn’t see but then the cat screamed and spoiled it and you had to give him some, too, to shut him up.
“Torn?”
She heard his footsteps, as light as an angel’s, coming down his white halls. Ada understood she awaited not only Torn but the next stage of human evolution. He had come from there, maybe by accident, taking a wrong turn on his way ahead in history. How long would he remain in her suburb? And could she go with him when he left?
“Hi.”
Torn’s voice preceded him. Ada hadn’t realized how delicate it was, how much like a snare drum brush. Or had it become like that and hadn’t been when they met?
“Hi yourself,” she said, trying to flirt, when he rounded the corner.
Did he extend his arms? Or did Ada just tell herself that to explain away her actions, that she had received an invitation to touch him? In any case, she went forward and wrapped herself in him, that’s what it felt like, covered herself with him like a fur cape a caveman might have made, except Torn’s skin was a fabric from the future. Her hands went under his billowing angel’s T-shirt, holding shoulder blades where wings would have been, as hard as hinges on doors that opened on another world, except Torn was no angel, he didn’t exist yet. Through his tunic-like trousers, Ada felt a penis as hard as those bones in his back and hard only for her, not hard for the hell of it or hard to hurt someone. No: it was a unique mix of hard and soft, one that wasn’t yet in her world. Everyone else had to wait for this next stage of sex; it was available just to Ada, to whom it had been delivered by mistake.
“I want you,” she said. “Want you want you,” meaning completely, to clarify.
Then she pulled back.
Like his voice, the rest of Torn was altered, too. Right? Not by a lot, but by a bit? Wasn’t there a strange asymmetry to his mouth and face now? Weren’t his jaws smaller and his teeth almost tiny? Was Torn taller and scrawny, his limbs ladder-like? And what had happened to that fierce, phallic nose and those lurid, lusty lips? Were his features now neutral, a mix of every race and both (every?) gender? Did he look a little like everyone, even like Ada? Had his erection already ended, as if announcing himself as hard was all he was interested in doing, the extent of his desire? It was obvious, while she was gone, Torn had evolved again.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, sensing her surprise.
“Nothing,” she said. How could she express what she couldn’t comprehend? There were no words in her head for him.
Ada turned to go, then stopped. The prospect of returning home was worse than remaining, for she knew the other place too well. Torn might be gone for good the next day. She had to catch him while she could.
So, Ada pulled Torn down, down, gently, to the floor. The two sank and rolled like remains of a dinner washed down the drain, but in a nice way. On the tiles or straw or whatever the surface was, he swirled around and into her. In sex, there was no effort on Torn’s part, the very minimum of movement: he made love like someone who’d never lifted a finger in his life or maybe just lifted and placed his fingers on pads and keyboards. Ada realized, in the future, all forward motion would be done for him, all the push of a person removed. So, he simply stayed in place and—did Ada feel anything at all? Static, without tension, she couldn’t come (she usually did with Dotson, maybe mildly but it wasn’t nothing). In the end, neither emitted anything. Was this the future of fooling around? Was it another kind of orgasm Ada could not identify as such?
Either way, when it was over, she was game to go again.
“Don’t go anywhere without me, Torn!” Ada said, beseechingly as she pulled on her clothes, rebuttoning her blouse wrong, she was so discombobulated, at the door. “Take me with you to the next stage, place, whatever!”
“Okay,” Torn said, mildly.
He stood in his threshold, watching Ada leave. He waved, brightly backlit like Hollywood’s idea of someone in heaven. Yet Torn was—and would continue to be, with her, with her, Ada hoped—on Earth.
But before she could do anything, at home, Ada was pulled into a computer call in which her remote work progress was assessed. In three onscreen boxes, two of her superiors and one randomly chosen peer offered criticism and suggestions, her colleague speaking with tortured reluctance, having had no choice but to appear. Ada felt flung back into a scolding childhood family conference or a show trial in a long-defunct dictatorship. She had tears in her eyes when her big face filled the screen and she logged off (though she knew she had not been fired or even denounced, only described as disappointing).
More tears flowed when an email arrived, itemizing the costs of Jada’s hospitalization without the insurance Ada had lost. (So far, tests had turned up nothing.) She imagined herself in the country before such protections were in place and wondered what people had done and what she would do now. Ada wished to ask Dotson but didn’t know his new hiding place: the basement door was open.
Then she gasped.
Someone else had broken into her home. A man slouched, his face bruised, covered with raised black and blue lumps. One arm in a sling hung limply.
“How did you get…”
“Shh,” Dotson said. With his bad arm, he struggled to give a thumbs up, meaning: a payment schedule had been negotiated, problem solved!
It was then Ada began to pack for the future. She grabbed her nylon pouch and—not knowing what else to bring, going far away—added a device on which she’d left a Swedish mystery novel started. This was all she carried through the mist into what used to be the butt end of her backyard, never looking back, intending never to return.
She needed an instant to recognize Torn’s house, set even farther back than before. When it was finally visible through the wisps and tendrils in the air, it barely appeared to be a building. Even hours earlier, it had been melting or dripping or otherwise unformed; now it was disassembled, as if pulled apart, a stage set being “struck” or an abstracted set in an avant-garde production, a “memory play” in which so much was just suggested. Yet there was Torn—or someone—standing hazy and half-obscured in hanging smoke, not a memory at all but a projection of what was to be.
Ada stepped over what was left of the outside wall and, in a manner of speaking, entered. Feeling both excited and silly, she held up her pouch as proof of her commitment to him.
“Look,” she told Torn. “I’m traveling light, but only in luggage, not in...”
She was about to say “love.” Ada had even planned to do one of those fist-to-the-heart gestures, a bit bro-like, she admitted, and which hand would she use, the right one holding the pouch? That would be weird. Anyway, none of it turned out to be necessary.
Torn or whoever it was turned. Whatever it was, maybe that was more exact. Her new neighbor had reacted to her voice automatically. It was unclear to Ada where its ears even were. Were ears those things on the sides of its... how could you even call it a head? Ada could make out gills which opened and closed on either end. Would they separate oxygen from carbon monoxide in the air of some settlement on another planet or in the lunar habitat it would be born on? And would so much radiation on, say, a space colony cause the extra fingers and cleft palate on the mouth it maybe had?
Forget the few human accessories, which were like earrings on Earth. Most of Torn had evolved into a machine. And don’t even ask about its lower “body,” which didn’t get close to being a groin. Being human, Ada was no longer Torn’s type. She had been too late—but could anyone come back fast enough to forestall his next stage? Even if she’d never left, he would have moved on too quickly for her to catch up.
Ada spun around and ran home, dropping her pouch along the way, like a baby kangaroo popping from—oh, what difference did comparisons make now? In the future, how much would past references matter to someone still alive? Soon nothing would be comparable to what was going on. Ada was stuck forever with what she already knew.
“Ready?”
Dotson stood in the front vestibule, weaving a bit with impatience. His wounds were healing, and he was dressed as himself and for work. Jada, sullen yet resigned, swallowing an antidepressant, had her bags packed beside him.
“You don’t want to be late on your first day back,” Dotson said.
“And I’ve got a train to catch,” Jada mumbled.
Ada changed from sweatpants into an outfit suitable for the office. They dropped Jada at the station just as her train for school was pulling in. In her haste to catch it, the girl had no time to kiss her parents. They waited and watched until she was out of sight.
On the highway into the city, Ada and Dotson got slowed down by traffic. They were never immobile but kept moving forward, very slowly.
Laurence Klavan wrote the story collection, "The Family Unit" and Other Fantasies, published by Chizine in Canada. His novella, Albertine, was published by Leamington Books in Scotland. An Edgar Award-winner, he received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics of "Bed and Sofa," the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theatre in London. His website is www.laurenceklavan.com.