The Waning Age Read online

  Why did I want a canopy bed? Beats me.

  We made a formidable team, I thought, as we strode down the peeling corridor. Cass in her gray suit and derby hat, Tabby in her violet sheath dress and serious pumps, me in my intense scowl. The principal’s office had clearly been renovated recently, unlike the rest of Moses. There was nothing left of the dowdy Mrs. Sarah Lambert, whom I remembered as a perfumed cloud of friendly inefficiency. Mr. Charles Freeman had his own style. It was striking, to say the least.

  Tabby’s theory is that everyone wants vintage now not just because vintage reminds us of the “time before,” the time when everything was still pretty much working the way it was supposed to and we could all feel things. She thinks that those old objects—all objects—absorbed the sentiments of the people who used them, and that we crave old things because we can sense through them, like distant echoes, those long-ago emotions. Maybe. I guess it is true that the objects I like most do seem more than in a way I can’t pinpoint.

  But what isn’t debatable is that there’s vintage and then there’s vintage. Maybe working summers with Tabby at the Good Ole Days had made me a snob, but still. You might not care about the difference between herringbone and houndstooth like I do, and you might think Arts and Crafts is something you do with construction paper and crayons. But everyone knows the difference between people who make the residues of the past come together into something beautiful versus people like Mr. Freeman.

  He clearly had a soft spot for the nineteenth century, and that was probably part of the problem, because that stuff is old. How much of it, do you really think, has absolutely no mold on it? I’d say not much. Mr. Freeman had Persian carpets, gilt frames, silk flowers in a massive Chinese vase, a wooden desk that looked about double the weight of our refrigerator, multiple religious paintings featuring blood in large quantities, and velvet curtains so plush you could easily suffocate a couple children in them and no one would be the wiser. All this in a building made of concrete block.

  I was a little taken aback. Were we at a funeral parlor or an elementary school? Mr. Freeman himself did not offer helpful clues. He wore a black three-piece suit, a heavy mustache, round-rimmed glasses, and an expression of listless unconcern that struck me as ominous. Cal was already there, sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair and looking, understandably, terrified. Eyes wide, pupils shrunken, hands clenching the straps of his backpack. I went over to him right away, before even greeting Mr. Freeman, and put my arm around him. He sank into me.

  “Mr. Freeman,” Cass was saying, extending her hand over the mountainous desk. “I am Cassandra Lawson, this is Tabitha Lawson. We are Natalia and Calvino’s foster parents.”

  “Nat,” I said, shaking hands with him after Tabby did. I’d taken off my gloves to shake his hand and now wished I hadn’t; it was clammy and strangely cold, as if he’d spent the last fifteen minutes clutching an ice cream carton.

  “Thank you for being here. This is Dr. Elizabeth Baylor.” He gestured to an open door that I hadn’t noticed because it was obscured by the profusion of silk flowers.

  Dr. Baylor had white-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a lab coat and slacks and burgundy clogs. Her hands were tucked into the pockets, like she was entirely at ease. “Hi, bienvenidas,” she said, giving us a big smile with lots of teeth that was meant to convince us how friendly and safe she was. It didn’t work. The smile did nothing to conceal a brain that was cool, remote, clinical. She looked about as safe as a razor blade on a bed of lettuce.

  Dr. Baylor didn’t offer to shake hands. She motioned us into the adjoining room and we tromped in behind her. Thankfully, this room had not been decorated by Mr. Freeman. Cement block had never looked so good. Screen decals ran in a line down one wall, and a cart of medical equipment stood waiting by a reclining chair. A standing desk perched like a podium below the high windows. There were no other seats besides the reclining chair. Dr. Baylor made a big show of turning down the lights to a muted yellow, closing the curtains, and tapping off all the personal screen decals on her desk: six streams of activity blinked off one after the other. “Have a seat in the important chair, Calvino,” she said, still smiling sunshine.

  “Before we start, Dr. Baylor,” Cass said politely, putting a hand on Cal’s shoulder, “we wanted to understand more fully why this testing is being done now and what the potential outcomes are.”

  This had been my idea. Cal wasn’t due for testing, and I wanted to know: whence the damn test?

  Dr. Baylor beamed a little brighter. “Of course. As you know, students go through standard testing once a year. They are also assessed regularly—even daily, in this crucial year—by their teachers. In-class assignments and activities provide the basis for assessment.”

  “So this was recommended by Cal’s teacher?” I cut in. Her verbiage was starting to wear on me.

  “Nope.” Dr. Baylor smiled at me. “Teachers don’t make those kinds of decisions. But they do gather information which they share with me, and I, in turn, share the information with my supervisor.”

  “You mean Mr. Freeman?” Tabby asked.

  Dr. Baylor actually laughed at this absurd notion. “I work on-site at the school, but I am employed by RealCorp, the company that manages and implements all student testing. In this case, there was probably some material in Cal’s file that suggested to my supervisor that we should take a little peek.”

  She opened her eyes wide and made a tiny lifting motion with her hand, like she was opening a magical music box. Nonetheless, what she’d just described was more spy story than fairy tale. Basically, Cal was surrounded by traitors and someone had ratted on him; now he would be interrogated. Nothing she said answered the important question: why now?

  I did my best to rearrange my features so Cal wouldn’t see what I was thinking, but it’s hard to get anything by him. He looked worried.

  “As for outcomes . . .” Dr. Baylor looked sunnily at Cal. “That depends on you, Calvino.” She shifted back to her script. “Just to remind you of what we’re doing here, we’ll be testing to see how your brain responds to affect stimulus, which is another way of saying we want to see your range of emotions. As you’ve learned in school, your brain is like a city, with lots of different neighborhoods. One of those neighborhoods is where all the emotions live. Sound familiar?”

  Cal nodded. “Yes.”

  “In children, it’s really easy to get to that neighborhood, no matter where you are in the city. But once affective waning occurs, the neighborhood is harder and harder to get to. It’s still there. Every adult still has that neighborhood. But by the time they have fully waned, the neighborhood is closed off. No one can get in or out.”

  “But the emotions still live there,” Cal said quietly.

  “What’s that?” Dr. Baylor asked, grinning fiercely.

  “The emotions are still there in the closed-off neighborhood.”

  Dr. Baylor’s grin faded a little. “Hm, interesting theory! We don’t really know what’s going on in that neighborhood in grown-ups. But we do know that we can measure where you are by seeing how many roads go in and out of the neighborhood. That’s what we’re going to check for now. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Ready to climb on into the important chair?”

  Cal shot me a look and then smiled briefly at the tiny roll of the eyes that I gave him. He climbed up into the plastic reclining chair. He leaned back but followed Dr. Baylor with his eyes. Cass, Tabby, and I stood in a line near the chair, facing the screen decals and waiting for the magic show to start. Mr. Freeman hovered by the door to his office.

  “Well, Calvino. Let’s begin, shall we?” Dr. Baylor asked Cal brightly.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Dr. Baylor opened the cart and pulled up a panel that had dozens of thin wires with clear suction cups. “This won’t hurt a bit,” she said, putting her full row of uppe
r teeth into a wide grin.

  With children, reading faces is pretty easy. They feel what they feel, and they hide it badly. With adults, it’s more complicated. There’s synthetic affects, which are pretty obvious, and then there’s sheer fakery. Everyone fakes it a little. I try not to, but sometimes I do. Mostly it slips into what I say, not how I act. I’m sorry. I’m not worried. You surprise me. That freaks me out!

  Yeah, I’m posturing. It’s no different than choosing the plastic bag that looks like real leather or the knockoff pumps that look designer. Faking it makes you seem like you can afford to feel. And who doesn’t want that? Every person you look at, you have to wonder, did that come from the pharmacy or the fake-factory? My shortcut—look at the clothes. If they’ve paid for actual leather, they’ve paid for actual drops.

  Dr. Baylor was something of a puzzle. As an employee of RealCorp, there was no doubt she could afford the actual drops. The clogs were scuffed, but they were Scandinavian. Yet the sunny disposition was clearly fake. Her eyes were overly wide; she had to strain to keep them open. Her lips kept sliding into a slight protrusion of contempt, no matter how hard she tried to preserve the big grin. So Dr. Baylor’s expensive drops were there to offer other emotions, emotions she had hidden behind the fake smile. I didn’t much like the effect.

  She plopped suction cups all over Cal’s arms and head. “There we are!” she pronounced, stepping back and flipping a switch. The big screen decals on the wall came to life. One had a list of words on it: emotions. The rest had pulsing circles, each a different color. “Now,” Dr. Baylor chirped. “Cal, this will be similar to the tests you’ve done in the past at the start of every school year, but the equipment I have in this instance is looking more closely at what’s going on in your brain and your body overall.”

  “Okay,” Cal agreed.

  “I’m going to prompt you to think about certain things, and you follow my lead. If one of the things I mention makes you think about a memory or a person or anything other than what I’ve mentioned, let me know. And as we go along, I’d like you to try to name the emotion you’re feeling. You can use the list on the screen, or come up with a different word if one comes to mind.”

  “Okay,” Cal said again.

  I gave him an encouraging nod when he looked at me.

  “Let’s begin.” As she concentrated on the script before her, Dr. Baylor’s false cheeriness vanished. Her voice was flat. It could not have been flatter as she said, “Think about your deceased mother.”

  Cal’s face tensed, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Which emotions are you feeling?” Dr. Baylor asked.

  The circles on the screen decals dissolved into amorphous blobs, each of them expanding or contracting and pulsing or shuddering as they shaped and reshaped themselves. Digital fireworks. Cal took a breath. “Anxiety. Sadness. Fear.”

  “Which of those would you say is greatest?”

  Cal swallowed. “Anxiety.”

  “Good. Now imagine you are traveling with your sister. You are going somewhere that was special to all three of you—you, your sister, and your mom. You are at the airport. You go to the restroom, and when you return to your gate, your sister is gone. You cannot find her anywhere.”

  Cal and I could hardly afford to take the train to Sacramento, let alone fly anywhere, but he seemed to find the situation plausible enough. “Anxiety,” he said, his voice strained.

  “Anything else?”

  Cal’s eyes searched the list. “Guilt,” he added.

  “Interesting,” Dr. Baylor murmured. “Imagine you have located your sister. She has boarded the flight. You watch through the windows as the plane leaves without you. As it prepares for takeoff, the plane malfunctions. It explodes and goes up in flames.”

  The colors on the screen decals were bursting away, and I glanced at the others to see what they thought of Dr. Baylor’s cute fantasy. Mr. Freeman looked like he was planning ahead to whether he should have Thai or Chinese for dinner. Cass was watching Dr. Baylor with that familiar expression indicating that she had found a new enemy, which was excellent news. Tabby was pointedly ignoring everyone but Cal. She was looking straight at him, her face open and encouraging but not falsely reassuring. Good old Tabby.

  “Which emotions?” Dr. Baylor prompted.

  “Anxiety,” Cal whispered. “And fear.”

  “Now you are standing at the window watching the plane, and you feel a hand on your shoulder. It is your sister. She never boarded the plane.”

  Cal blinked with relief. “Happiness.”

  I could dimly remember what it was like to have that ability—the imaginative faculty. The power to conjure a thing and make it real around you until, poof, you decided it wasn’t real anymore. That ability had vanished around age ten as well, come to think of it, but no one seemed to lament its loss or even remark upon it. As far as I know, people have always outgrown the ability to make the imagined real, long before waning entered our world. Isn’t that the point of Peter Pan?

  I could still recall my first failed attempt. I was standing in the patch of weeds that grew beside our building, and that patch of weeds could be many things—a desert, a cold tundra, a mountain, a forest. On that day it was supposed to be a city of skyscrapers. I looked around me and found that I was surrounded, to my surprise, by weeds. Wild carrot and clover and crabgrass. I tried again. Nothing. It was like opening your wings and finding they’d been shredded down to the bones.

  Cal still had wings. I could see that the things Dr. Baylor was describing were real to him.

  “You cancel your trip and head home. When you get there, you find that your house has been transformed into a mansion. There’s a pool and fancy cars.” Dr. Baylor stopped. “Hm.” She turned away from the monitors and peered at Cal. “What is it?”

  Cal looked sad. “If we live in a mansion it will be harder to see Cass and Tabby and Joey. I like where we live now.”

  You can see why I love him to death.

  Dr. Baylor seemed stumped. “Okay,” she improvised. “You find your apartment just as you left it, but when you get upstairs you find a winning lottery ticket on your kitchen table.”

  Cal looked uncomfortable.

  “Which emotions?”

  “Um . . . I guess . . . there isn’t a word on there that fits.”

  Dr. Baylor turned the honey on and smiled at him. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking about what to do with the lottery money.”

  “You can do whatever you want with it.”

  “I’ve been to the hotel where my sister works,” Cal said. I could tell he was trying hard to be polite. “I don’t think being rich is for me.”

  I wanted to laugh but I thought that might make Cal look bad, so I pretended to sneeze into my glove.

  “Well,” Dr. Baylor said. “Imagine you come home and find the thing you want most in the world to find.” She paused. “Got it?”

  Cal nodded. He closed his eyes. I watched his hands, stiff at his sides, drift unconsciously toward each other. He clasped them. “Sadness,” he said quietly, his eyes still closed. Then his chin wobbled a little, and a tear slid sideways down his cheek toward his ear. I knew what he was thinking about, and it was no surprise his thoughts would drift there, helplessly carried along like a paper boat in a storm gutter, careening toward the drain. This was the cost of having too much imagination, of having too much sentiment, of having too many painful, unanswerable questions. Of being Cal.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dr. Baylor asked, her treacly voice heavy in the quiet room.

  I spared him the necessity of trying to talk as though he weren’t crying. That was something I could do for him, at least. “He’s imagining coming home to find our mother,” I said, and my voice was just as flat as Dr. Baylor’s. As flat as an ocean horizon, viewed from a shore you know you’ll n
ever leave. “Is that your last question?”

  She blinked rapidly. “Yes. The test is over.”

  I crossed the room and put my hand out to Cal. He gripped it hard and pulled himself up out of the chair, and I observed the dignity with which he wiped his eyes. He didn’t apologize for crying.

  5

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 8

  Plausibility. It’s one of the many reasons I’m indebted to Raymond Chandler. Yes, the author. Early twentieth-century noir, located on the fiction shelf right between “abundant alcoholism” and “misguided masculinity.” His detective, Philip Marlowe, comes as close as I’ve seen to our emotionless future. Maybe Chandler had a nightmare, and Marlowe’s world was in it, or maybe, prophet-like, he could see the slow decline approaching in the cold hearts and callous faces of 1930s Los Angeles. However it happened, his Marlowe does it—even in a world still premised on the availability and influence of emotion, Marlowe moves through it, calm and unflappable, making it seem plausible that one might survive in a hard, sordid, unfair world without the soaring ecstasies and raptures of triumph and true loves that seem to carry every other character ever written.

  I know he’s not actually emotionless. Sometimes his face gets red. Sometimes he even gets mad. And yes, Chandler sees all the people who are not white men with the eyes of a 1930s white man, and he uses some nasty names in the process. Nevertheless, Marlowe has been a good guide to me. My mom was not tough. Her approach to the world could be summed up with the oft-misused, typically Californian term “easygoing,” which is a nice way of saying that she was like a kite in a windstorm. I knew, watching her, that easygoing was not for me. But most of the truly tough people I’ve known are tough without integrity, and that doesn’t seem right, either. With Marlowe, I’ve got tough and principled with the occasional condescension to underhanded when the game is rigged and the stakes are against you. That’s an approach I can live with.