The Future Pt. 2

Do you remember being in grade school and having a poster diagram of the layers of the rainforest on the wall of your classroom, on the science bulletin board? Or maybe it was in your science textbook instead. "Anatomy of a Rainforest Ecosystem." I was just thinking about that poster because right now I am sitting on a white wicker chair on my balcony, looking at the bright green treetops at my eye-level and thinking about the different layers of my street as seen from my balcony. I would label them as follows: street level, tree level, mid-rise building level, high-rise building level, satellite dish level, pollution level. Maybe I will draw this out as a real diagram.

On the street level there would be the window fronts of the Vodaphone store and the dry-cleaner's and the cars and trash and huge fallen leaves and feral cats sleeping under cars and stray dogs sleeping on top of cars and men sitting together smoking shisha and drinking tea on the sidewalk and little kids selling flowers and packs of tissues.

The tree level would be mostly dense green banana-leaves and something resembling ferns but also first- and second-floor balconies where young men sit together and smoke cigarettes and watch soccer on TV and whistle at us invisibly when we are running to catch the bus or buy bread at the bakery on the street below, and geckos, and the always-shuttered windows of apartments without air conditioning, and the dripping dirty water of the ever-running air conditioners installed in the walls of other apartments.

The mid-rise building level is all shuttered windows and potted plants on empty balconies and clothes-lines with fluttering sheets and undergarments made from synthetic material and electrical lines running from satellite dishes to more satellite dishes across the street.

At the high-rise building level there are just windows with no balconies, no clothes-lines, just blank windows reflecting the sky and rooftops with even bigger, more complicated satellite-dish configurations.

Above that, the sky and the haze of car exhaust and smoke and the buzz of insects and huge birds tracing circles in the sky. I have never seen an airplane in the over-head sky, just like I have never seen the stars.

It is impossible not sit here and begin to wonder about what is going on in all the apartments I can see from where I am sitting. I can easily see hundreds of apartments, the identical concrete-and-glass facades of hundreds families making lunch and napping in the afternoon heat. Above the street-level, there is not a single visible person on any of the balconies or any of the windows. I am alone with the birds in this landscape suspended in the air above traffic. If this were a movie, I could hang a sign out here saying something in Arabic like "Is anybody out there?" or "Do you believe in happiness?" or "Help! I'm being held captive in this apartment!" and see if anyone responds in kind. "I do not believe in happiness but I believe in love!" or "Everyone is a captive until he sets himself free!" or "Here I am, you're not alone, of course." But this is not a movie, and Kathryn just peeked her head through the sliding door to our apartment to ask if I want coffee because she is going out.




I Google-image searched the rainforest diagram because I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't making it up. The drawing I remember had animals and birds and insects tucked amongst the shrubs and trees, tucans and bright parrots and hanging monkeys or sloths and segmented-thousand legged caterpillar-things. I liked that all the diagrams I found are slightly different; there is no authoritative version of the composition of a rainforest. I miss taking tests based on simple memorization of the truths of the universe: the rock cycle, the table of elements, multiplication and long division and irregular Spanish verbs. The tests I take now are all in my head and less based on truth than on my capacity to construct a logical argument and placate myself. Those are the professor's explicit instructions: "You will not be graded on the position you take but on your ability to support that position."

In some primordial past I was gifted with the ability to graft together truth with words and skin and dissolving-thread sutures on a stainless steel surgical table in the womb in the belly of a world and I might be sitting here in daylight sweating with wet hair and a glass jar of cold Nescafe but where I am really is in an empty room with a computer where I have been for centuries (before this they gave me an abacus and after that a pencil and for awhile I had a giant word processor and soon there will be software that takes my dictation and turns it into text on a screen) and I am making it all up, the trees, my sweat, your feet, everything, and you are in your own room doing the same, and so far my two conclusions are that the future is vast and that I look better with short hair.