Mark shifts his gaze to the ceiling. “Of course she was really yelling at my father, who by that point had been dead for years. Both my mother and my father had these rigidities, these . . . you could call them I guess frozen attitudes toward each other. Or maybe frozen emotions. In later years when either one of them complained to me about the other, they would always bring up the same anecdote to justify their indignation. My mother complained about some Saturday an eon ago when Susan was little and my mother wanted some free time and she asked my father if he’d look after her for the afternoon and he got angry and said he worked hard all week and she never asked him again because he was so angry it almost frightened her. She always told it the same way, in the same words. For his part, my father would talk about the time when my mother said he was a terrible father because he called Susan a whore, when all he meant to say was that she was wearing too much makeup, etcetera etcetera. They repeated these grievances over and over to me, but as far as I could tell they never said them to each other. They seemed incapable of listening to each other, of reformulating the tiniest detail of their outraged memories.”
“Trash?” The stewardess is passing with her bag. Mark throws it all in.
“I can’t remember when I finally told you that my sister was killed in Yugoslavia,” he says.
“Me neither.”
“I might have said at some point that I went to Yugoslavia to see the place where she died. Do you want more coffee? I see a pot coming.”
“Yes.” To the steward she says, “Cream, no sugar.”
“I’ll have one, too,” Mark says. “Also with the nondairy creamer.”
“No, you didn’t tell me,” Saskia says.
“I’d never paid much attention to politics. Most of it seems impervious to help, so why waste time on it? But my sister did try to help, and even though it killed her, or maybe because it killed her, I respected her desire to do that more than my own desire to be left alone. When I went there I talked to people she worked with, including some government officials. The hatred between the ethnic groups reminded me of my parents’ fights, only with guns. No one was listening to anyone else, and as a consequence good people like my sister died. I met the man who’d been my sister’s interpreter, and he said that the ethnic divisions in Yugoslavia had been deliberately exacerbated by the various state medias, and that if we supposedly superior Americans had a propaganda outlet working to foment discord, then in five years we, too, would have a civil war. Well, look where we are today. My desire is still to ignore it, but for my sister’s sake, or in her memory, or whatever, I force myself to watch Fox News. It’s hard to sit through, but I think of it as doing science. These are observations I need to make if I’m going to understand why the United States might self-destruct. Just yesterday Trump won the South Carolina primary.”
“Yes, I know.”
“A scientific paper last year presented results of a study of the human Y chromosome. It offered strong evidence of a bottleneck in male diversity occurring about 7000 years ago. The most convincing theory to account for this is that, with the spread of agriculture, which enabled larger population concentrations and an increase in social stratification, more-powerful patrilineal groups killed off all the males of less-powerful groups and took their females for mating purposes. Ninety-five percent of all human males during this period appear to have been wiped out. Human in-group/out-group murderousness goes far deeper than culture or economics, it’s a biological consequence of the fact that genes good at crowding out competing genes survive to pass on to their descendants their proficiency at crowding out competing genes. It’s such a robust argument that altruism among humans is much harder to explain.”
“That’s interesting. I wonder, though—”
“Of course we humans have enormous brains. We are able to become aware of these genetic tendencies and can choose not to follow them. But most humans don’t seem to enjoy using their brains, or value its use in others.”
“Mark?”
“On the other hand, you could argue that human intelligence is destroying the world more efficiently than human stupidity. Advances in agriculture and medicine lead to billions of people, resource depletion, and climate change. It’s like forest management. The US Forest Service suppressed small fires for decades until the forests were unnaturally full of brush and deadwood, after which the fires became devastating and unstoppable. For 40,000 years, human intelligence has repeatedly figured its way out of the small fires, so now here comes the big one.”
“Mark?”
“So is it people like Trump who are bringing on the end of the world as we know it, or is it people like me?”
“Mark?”
“Hm?”
“Why are you talking about all this?”
He can feel himself blush. “I’m rattling on. I’m sorry. I must be boring you.”
“I didn’t say you were boring me. What I asked was, ‘Why are you talking about this?’”
He looks at her. He knows how
