“So why are you dating me at all, if you get to choose? You know how it’ll turn out. For that matter, why aren’t you rich and famous? Why not pick a future where you win the lottery, or become a star?”
Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated sub-basement of a tech company in Providence, RI, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months.
“Well,” Judy says. “It’s not really that simple. I mean, the next six months, assuming I don’t change my mind, they contain some of the happiest moments of my life, and I see it leading to some good things, later on. And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged 97, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment.”
“So I’m a stepping stone,” Doug says, not at all bitterly. He’s somehow finished his second beer already, even though Judy’s barely made a dent in her Bloody Mutiny.
“You’re maybe going to take this journey with me for a spell,” Judy says. “People aren’t stones.”
And then Doug has to catch the last train back to Providence, and Judy has to bike home to Somerville. Marva, her roommate, has made popcorn and hot chocolate, and wants to know the whole story.
“It was nice,” Judy says. “He was a lot cuter in person than I’d remembered, which is really nice. He’s tall.”
“That’s it?” Marva said. “Oh come on, details. You finally meet the only other freaking clairvoyant on Earth, your future boyfriend, and all you have to say is, ‘He’s tall.’ Uh uh. You are going to spill like a fucking oil tanker, I will ply you with hot chocolate, I may resort to Jim Beam, even.”
Marva’s “real” name is Martha, but she changed it years ago. She’s a grad student studying 18th century lit, and even Judy can’t help her decide whether to finish her PhD. She’s slightly chubby, with perfect crimson hair and clothing by Sanrio, Torrid, and Hot Topic. She is fond of calling herself “mallternative.”
“I’m drunk enough already. I nearly fell off my bicycle a couple times,” Judy says.
The living room is a pigsty, so they sit in Judy’s room, which isn’t much better. Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures she’s witnessed, and they cover every surface. There’s a plastic replica of a Filipino fast food mascot, Jollibee, which she might give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing Sukey’s collection and making her a friend for life—or Judy and Sukey may never meet at all. A phalanx of stuffed animals crowds Judy and Marva on the big fluffy bed. The room smells like a sachet of whoop-ass (cardamom, cinnamon, lavender) that Judy opened up earlier.
“He’s a really sweet guy.” Judy cannot stop talking in platitudes, which bothers her. “I mean, he’s really lost, but he manages to be brave. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to feel like you have no free will at all.”
Marva doesn’t point out the obvious thing—that Judy only sees choices for herself, not anybody else. Suppose a guy named Rocky asks Marva out on a date, and Judy sees a future in which Marva complains, afterwards, that their date was the worst evening of her life. In that case, there are two futures: One in which Judy tells Marva what she sees, and one in which she doesn’t. Marva will go on the miserable date with Rocky, unless Judy tells her what she knows. (On the plus side, in fifteen months, Judy will drag Marva out to a party where she meets the love of her life. So there’s that.)
“Doug’s right,” Marva says. “I mean, if you really have a choice about this, you shouldn’t go through with it. You know it’s going to be a disaster, in the end. You’re the one person on Earth who can avoid the pain, and you still go sticking fingers in the socket.”
“Yeah, but …” Judy decides this will go a lot easier if there are marshmallows in the cocoa, and runs back to the kitchen alcove. “But going out with this guy leads to good things later on. And there’s a realization that I come to as a result of getting my heart broken. I come to understand something.”
“And what’s that?”
Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a glass of water.
“I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”
“So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”
“I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only 43 when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”
“Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”
“I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”
Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately wishes he had options.
He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.
“God damnit! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.
Doug sits a minute, dry-sobbing. Then he goes and gets his dustpan and brush.
He phones Judy a few days later. “Hey, so do you want to hang out again on Friday?”
“Sure,” Judy says. “I can come down to Providence this time. Where do you want to meet up?”
“Surprise me,” says Doug.
“You’re a funny man.”
Judy will be the second long-term relationship of Doug’s life. His first was with Pamela, an artist he met in college, who made headless figurines of people who were recognizable from the neck down. (Headless Superman. Headless Captain Kirk. And yes, headless Wonder Woman, which Doug always found bitterly amusing for reasons he couldn’t explain.) They were together nearly five years, and Doug never told her his secret. Which meant a lot of pretending to be surprised at stuff. Doug is used to people thinking he’s kind of a weirdo.
Doug and Judy meet for dinner at one of those mom-and-pop Portuguese places in East Providence, sharing grilled squid and seared cod, with fragrant rice, with a bottle of heady vinho verde. Then they walk Judy’s bike back across the river towards the kinda-sorta gay bar on Wickenden Street. “The thing I like about Providence,” says Doug, “is it’s one of the American cities that knows its best days are behind it. So it’s automatically decadent, and sort of European.”
“Well,” says Judy, “it’s always a choice between urban decay or gentrification, right? I mean, cities aren’t capable of homeostasis.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Doug is thinking he wants to kiss Judy. She leans up and kisses him first, on the bridge in the middle of the East Bay Bicycle Path. They stand and watch the freeway lights reflected on the water, holding hands. Everything is cold and lovely and the air smells rich.
Doug turns and looks into Judy’s face, which the bridge lights have turned yellow. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Doug realizes he’s inadvertently quoted Phil Collins. First he’s mortified, then he starts laughing like a maniac. For the next half hour, Doug and Judy speak only in Phil Collins quotes.
“You can’t hurry love,” Judy says, which is only technically a Collins line.
Over microbrews on Wickenden, they swap origin stories, even though they already know most of it. Judy’s is pretty simple: She was a little kid who overthought choices like which summer camp to go to, until she realized she could see how either decision would turn out. She still flinches when she remembers how she almost gave a valentine in third grade to Dick Petersen, who would have destroyed her. Doug’s story is a lot worse: he started seeing the steps ahead, a little at a time, and then he realized his dad would die in about a year. He tried everything he could think of, for a whole year, to save his dad’s life. He even buried the car keys two feet deep, on the day of his dad’s accident. No fucking use.
