In the electricity of love, its lightning strike
or in its quiet hum in the thighs
like this little ice-box here
not knowing any better
Jean Valentine, Lucy
1.
Alexandru spends the afternoon settling into the twenty-four hour news cycle. A report describes the burning of the National Museum of Brazil, and the partial destruction of the Jagger Library in Cape Town. He recalls the deliberate destruction of numerous ancient sites by ISIS, including the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud. He is already into his second glass of wine. The news, as his father would say, it riles the blood.
Alexandru begins to consider human civilization as a giant eraser, removing as much as possible in its wake. Whole languages and cultures lost through indifference and general incompetence.
At the top of the hour, fresh details on the ongoing conflict along the Gaza Strip. Palestinian apartment buildings bombed, reduced to rubble. Death upon death upon death. This, he realizes, is how the human populations devolve into the Eloi, the fictional and passive post-human race from H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine (1895). Unlike the twentieth century fears of planet-wide catastrophe that brought us to The Planet of the Apes (1968), the world will erode more slowly, accumulatively. He refills his glass.
A popular meme suggests that some people want to watch the world burn. But what if that’s true?
Being free of history doesn’t make one weightless. It makes one hollow.
2.
A red Mustang cheers past their driveway, flags and torsos pouring out passenger windows. Shouts and car horns doppler.
After Alexandru and Myrna purchased their house in Little Italy, they discovered this was the neighbourhood patter. Their front door stepped immediately onto Preston Street, so there was no escaping the street festivals or outdoor patios. There was a tone of camaraderie he was unfamiliar with, one that was constant, loud and communal. Neighbours greeting neighbours, simultaneously arguing and laughing. At first he was irritated. He slowly began to admire the ways in which people celebrated, even for something he considered as meaningless as sports. From the street noise, he could always tell when a game was on.
And they knew all they needed to do was to step out into it and they would be welcomed.
3.
Myrna’s red sweater lay across the kitchen chair. Earlier in the day, he mentioned to her that he believed it irresponsible to have children. There were so many orphaned and fostered children already in the world, he told her, we should be focusing our attentions on them, and not be mindlessly creating more. Myrna stood, dumbfounded, as her whole face crumbled. She had no idea he felt this way. She didn’t disagree with anything he said, but she’d always dreamed of giving birth to children of her own. She needed some time to think, she told him, and she went out. He didn’t know where, or for how long.
4.
By the time Emma Martina Luigia Morano died in 2017, she had been recorded as the oldest Italian person ever, and the fourth oldest person in recorded history. She was the last living person on earth verified to have been born in the 19th century. On November 29, 1899 in the Kingdom of Italy, Morano was born mere weeks after the onset of the Boer War. She lived through the end of the Victorian era and influenza, two World wars and the atomic bomb, and the eventual onmipotence of the digital age. She would live through the assassination of the Italian King, Umberto I, although she would have been too young to remember it.
These titles are ironically short-lived, as Morano only achieved her title of oldest living person in 2016, with the death of Susannah Mushatt Jones, the last American alive in the 19th century. It is curious to note that while both women married, they had, after a short while, each separated from their husbands. Neither were blessed or burdened with children.
5.
Alexandru contemplates Wells’ novel, and even the contemporary film remake. It wasn’t a great film, but he appreciated the shifts in the telling. If civilization was pointed into a singular direction, what might the professor actually be saving upon his return to that far-flung future? Even if he could move the Eloi into a self-aware and self-sustaining civilization, would it lead to the same eventual end?
Time is but an endless series of loops, after all. This is the suggestion of the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Might this, the gods wondered at the end of the series, be the flow that breaks the cycle?
6.
When Alexandru went to answer the doorbell, he found Myrna’s father on their front step. Phil held out his hand.
Alexandru knew that, according to Romanian custom, when two men shake hands, the one with the colder hand will be the first of them to die. Alexandru couldn’t risk it.