The Future for Curious People: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

personnel. It’s the only way I can stop myself from further losing it. “If you aren’t going to put the ring on, you should give it back. That’s customary, isn’t it?”
    She tightens her grip on the box and refuses to look at me. She looks at everything but me.
    “Do you know how ridiculous we look right now?” I am saying this, but my mouth is barely moving.
    She doesn’t answer, doesn’t move.
    “What? Do you want me to wrestle that box from you?” I’m trying to joke now, but it’s not going over.
    Madge is breathing hard. The steam is rising from her mouth into the cold air. It is her pre-cry panting. I am softening or melting or both. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Once when Madge’s parents were in town, they pulled me aside and her mother said, “Madge has had a very affirmed childhood. We want her to spend her life with someone who truly appreciates everything about her. Everything.”
    “Everything?” I said.
    Her father then said, “Madge’s affirmed childhood was her mother’s idea. It makes her a force of nature. All that affirmation and no real failure for her to apply it to? Well, it’s all bottled up. It’s a force field, Godfrey. Good luck.”
    I don’t want to give in. I stiffen up and try to sound definitive. If I had a necktie on, I’d straighten the shit out of it. “I’m not going to look into our future, Madge. I’m not. It goes against everything I believe in.”
    She looks up at me. “You have a belief system?”
    I nod weakly. “I think I do.” I look around the street, the row of trees buckling the sidewalk. “I’m pretty sure I do.”

Evelyn
SAVING GATSBY
    My boss, Mr. Gupta, walks over to me behind the desk in Youth Services. He’s typically bookish. His shoulders slope toward a doughy center. The fuzz of his sweaters seems to have molded to his body. And of course he’s wearing bifocals. He was raised in India and therefore has no tolerance for whining of any kind—even the completely valid inner-city Baltimore variety. Much less if you try to tell Gupta that you don’t want people eating out of the take-out box you put in the communal fridge for lunch on the grounds that it’s unsanitary to co-eat from take-out boxes, he’ll say, “Oh, please. Afraid of a few germs? In India people just die on the streets. You step over bodies. It’s just how it is!”
    But today he doesn’t have his normal bravado. “Evelyn Shriner,” he says, as he often refers to me by my full name. “The woman in the bathroom on the third floor is dying her hair in the sink.” Fadra is a homeless woman who’s been living in the library—for all intents and purposes—for a couple of years. She has the strange habit of bringing up the fine art of taxidermy at certain moments when she feels attacked and with a glint in her eye that makes me feel like a muskrat about to be stuffed and boxed in a small display case. “I just feel like dying your hair is really bold,” Gupta says. “A new level of bold. I need you to go talk to her.” Gupta shrugs apologetically and then makes a shooing motion with his hands, flipping them forward on the hinges of his wrists.
    “Mr. Gupta,” I say politely. “Wouldn’t that be Cherelle’s area?” The library is a carefully organized landscape of territories drawn by a group of carefully organized human beings. I reside in Youth Services. (I should note that I’m the whitey minority in this library, which means I sometimes don’t get the jokes.) It’s as if the third floor is an arctic region clearly out of my domain. Plus, I’d like to pawn this off on Cherelle because I’m scared of Fadra. This is why Gupta himself isn’t going in after her.
    Gupta shakes his head vehemently. “There was the incident,” Gupta says, pushing up his glasses, “as you well know. And Cherelle has become a little nervous, you know. I’ll never understand it, but she can no longer confront others. Personally, it strikes me as an American privilege to