Of course, the Great Filter might be in front of us. It’s possible that the rise of intelligence is common, but that technological civilizations don’t last long. When Mark was younger, people usually thought of nuclear war in this connection, but today most scientists would probably bet on resource depletion and environmental degradation. Intelligence is probably not a smart evolutionary strategy. While the dinosaurs drooled for 170 million years, the conditions in which they thrived remained relatively unchanged. Does anyone think that Earth’s ecosystem will survive the onslaught of human industrial ingenuity for a fraction of that time in some recognizable form? Forget a million years, forget a hundred thousand. Mark wouldn’t bet on one thousand. In cosmic terms, that’s less than a blink of the eye.
Here’s Mark’s bet: human ingenuity, rather soon, will cause a mass extinction event. Intelligence might survive the initial collapse, but won’t endure afterward longer than a few thousand years. Ecosystems will evolve and species will speciate and hundreds more millions of years will go by, with more extinction events, caused by this and that (volcanism, asteroid impact, cosmic ray burst, supercontinent desertification, snowball Earth events), after each of which life will recover and again diversify. There’s no reason to think it inevitable, or even likely, that intelligence will rise again, but if it does, it will bring on another environmental collapse in short order. The Sun will continue to get hotter. The seas will boil away. The atmosphere will be stripped off by the solar wind. Eventually, only underground bacterial life will remain. Then the Sun will bloat, burp, make a small fuss, and Earth will be incinerated. What will be left is a white dwarf inside a cloud of expanding gases whose constituent atoms are excited by solar radiation and emit photons as they calm down, resulting in the celestial object misnamed a “planetary nebula.” Some of these are extraordinarily beautiful, as the clouds nested within clouds glow at different parts of the spectrum. When Mark was an undergraduate he knew a professor who would end his lecture on planetary nebulae by expressing the hope that, five billion years from now, when Earth is gone, an intelligent creature on some distant planet in the Milky Way might train its telescope on our former Sun and say, “Wow, will you look at that one! That’s a real pretty one.”
He’s falling asleep.
Mette.
His eyes fly open. He hears her mother’s voice, “Mark—fuck! Pass the test!”
He fumbles for his phone on the bedside table, is dazzled by the awakened screen, types without forethought, I guess I’m a little worried. Could you send me a note? Sends it.
PART TWO
1935–1951
“Your first word, sweetheart, was ‘kitty.’”
Genny is looking at a photo of her tiny self, reaching out a dimpled hand to a calico cat. Calico cats are always girls, isn’t that funny? Genny is six.
“I want a cat,” she says.
But her mother has told her a hundred times.
“I want a little brother,” Genny says.
“Don’t be fresh.”
She wants to be fresh. “Why can’t I?”
“Aren’t we a happy family, you and me and Daddy?”
“I want one!”
This gets her a smack on the bottom. “You’ve hurt Mommy’s feelings. Go to your room.”
She goes, failing not to cry, furious, bereft.
• • •
Genny lives in Washington, DC, on Harrison Street, in a square brick house painted white in a line with other houses that look kind of different but are all the same size and shape. Every house has a narrow back yard and there are no trees or bushes, so you can stand there looking through the wire to the other yards and keep hoping to see other children.
• • •
Genny and her mother are visiting her grandparents on the farm in Alabama. Daddy has to keep working at his office in DC. He works for the Bureau of Public Roads.
Grampa Stoakes has chickens in the back yard. Genny wants to hold one. She chases them, but would never hurt one. Grammie Eula showed her how to twist the neck for dinner, but she refused to do it. Grammie told her it hardly mattered to a chicken.
For the family photo, cousin Bob is holding a hen, and Genny makes a fuss until she can hold it.
Grampa Stoakes has been losing chickens at night, and he declares he’s sure a nigger is stealing them.
“More likely a fox,” says Grammie Eula.
Grampa sits up two nights straight with a shotgun. “I always wanted to shoot me a nigger,” he says. He talks whiffly because he doesn’t have any teeth.
Nothing happens except he gets tired. “Looks like the fox is too smart for you,” Grammie Eula says.
Genny thinks Grammie Eula is smart and Grampa Stoakes is stupid.
“You wouldn’t take your eyes off that stupid chicken,” her mother says when they look at the photos later. “Everyone else is looking nicely into the camera.”
• • •
“You wouldn’t even nap right until you were six months old. I kept putting you on your stomach and you’d roll onto your back. Then you’d wake up and fuss when I put you the right way down again.”
Her mother talks a lot about regularity. “Did you do your business this morning?” If Genny has a stomachache it’s because she hasn’t had enough B.M.s. She sits on the toilet, waiting.
Every April she gets the dose of strychnine. This is her spring cleaning
