“I’m sorry,” she said. “That must have been bad.”
He nodded. Abruptly he stood. He wandered around her little kitchen, his back to her. Out the window the night was black, the lights on the rise of the Zuriberg glowing all fuzzy in the night’s smirr. He was breathing hard, as if recovering from a sprint, or trying not to cry.
She listened to his deep rapid breathing. Could be he was charging himself up to do something to her.
After a while he sat across from her again. “Yes it was bad,” he said. “Everyone died. I died. Then they brought me back.”
“Are you all right now?” she asked.
“No!” he cried out angrily. “I’m not all right!”
“I meant physically.”
“No! Not physically. Not any way!” He shook his head, as if shaking away certain thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. She sipped her tea. “So. You want to talk to me. About that, I assume.”
He shook his head. “Not that. That was just the start. That was what made me want to talk to you, maybe, but what I want to say isn’t about that. What I want to tell you is this”— and he looked her in the eye. “It’s going to happen again.”
She swallowed involuntarily. “Why do you think so?”
“Because nothing’s changed!” he exclaimed. “Why do you ask me that!”
He stood up again, agitated. Now his flushed face turned an even darker red. His brows were bunched together. He leaned over her and said fiercely, in a low choked voice, “Why do you pretend not to know!”
She took a breath. “I don’t pretend. I really don’t know.”
He shook his head, glaring down at her.
“That’s why I’m doing this,” he said, voice low and furious. “You do know. You only pretend not to know. You all pretend. You’re head of the United Nations Ministry for the Future, and yet you pretend not to know what the future is bringing down on us.”
“No one can know that,” she said, meeting his eye. “And I have to say, the ministry is organized under the Paris Agreement. The UN isn’t directly involved.”
“You’re the Ministry for the Future.”
“I lead it, yes.”
He looked at her silently for a long time. At some point in this inspection, still looking at her, he sat back down across from her. He leaned over the table toward her.
“So,” he said, “what do you and your ministry know about the future, then.”
“We can only model scenarios,” she said. “We track what has happened, and graph trajectories in things we can measure, and then we postulate that the things we can measure will either stay the same, or grow, or shrink.”
“Things like temperatures, or birth rates, or like that.”
“Yes.”
“So you know! I mean, in your exercises, is there any scenario whatsoever in which there won’t be more heat waves that kill millions of people?”
“Yes,” she said.
But she was troubled. This possibility that he was bringing up to her now was exactly what kept her awake at night, night after night. Scenarios with good results, in which they managed to avoid more incidents of mass deaths, were in fact extremely rare. People would have to do things they were not doing. His presence in her kitchen was all too much like one of her insomniac whirlpools of thought, as if she had stumbled into one of her nightmares while still awake, so that she couldn’t get out of it.
“Ha!” he cried, reading this off her face.
She grimaced, trying to erase the look.
“Come on,” he said. “You know. You know the future.” It sounded like he might hurt his voice, he was so intent to speak without shouting. He coughed, shook his head. “And yet you’re not doing anything about it. Even with your job.”
He stood again, went to her sink, took a glass out of the drainer, filled it from the tap, took a drink. He brought it with him back to the table, sat again.
“We’re doing what we can,” she said.
“No you’re not. You’re not doing everything you can, and what you are doing isn’t going to be enough.” He leaned toward her again and captured her gaze, his eyes bloodshot and bugging out, pale tortured blue eyes scarcely held in by his sweating red face— transfixing her— “Admit it!” he exclaimed, still strangling his voice to less than a shout.
She sighed. She tried to think what to say to him. The look in his eye scared her; maybe he was thinking that if he killed her now, someone more effective would replace her. It looked like that was what he was thinking. And here they were, after all. She had been kidnapped and taken to her own apartment. When this happened to women they often died.
Finally she shrugged, heart racing. “We’re trying.”
For a long time they sat there looking at each other. She got the impression he was letting her ponder her statement for a while. Letting her stew in the juices of her own futility.
Finally he said, “But it isn’t working. You’re trying, but it isn’t enough. You’re failing. You and your organization are failing in your appointed task, and so millions will die. You’re letting them down. Every day you let them down. You set them up for death.”
She sighed. “We’re doing all we can with what we’ve got.”
“No you’re not.”
His face flushed again, he stood up again. He circled in her kitchen like a trapped animal. He was breathing heavily. Here it comes, she thought despite herself. Her heart was really racing.
Finally he stopped over her. He leaned down at her yet again. He spoke again in the low choked voice that seemed all he could manage.
“This is why I’m here. You have to stop thinking that you’re doing all you can. Because you’re not. There’s more you could be doing.”
“Like what?”
He stared at her. He sat down again across from her, put his face in his hands. Finally he released his face, sat back in his
