The City Of Probabilities
Andrew Bertaina
After the wedding, we both attended graduate school in distant cities, waiting our turn for a chance to take a swing at life. I waited tables at a small Italian place while she studied environmental science at the University of Michigan, and she worked at a daycare while I studied English literature at a small school in Washington, D.C. We’d moved south then, in hopes of finding a place where we could both use our expertise, and I’d gotten a job teaching high school. Amy was floundering though, depressed at the lack of interest where we’d settled in the consequences of our environmental actions for various species of penguins. After her degree, she had high hopes of getting a job at a regulatory office, helping to keep streams and lakes clean of industrial and farmland run off, which was partially responsible for creating algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico.
The things you can learn, I’d say excitedly.
Most of the things I learn are God-awful, she answered.
But still, I said. Learning. Ever the enthusiastic schoolboy. For me, the relationship between facts and reality had been severed by the advanced study of literature. When you spend a whole semester trying to decode what Virginia Woolf was up to with all those lovely fragments in The Waves you lose the sense that anything you think or learn really has import outside of whether your interpretation is the correct one at the pub where everyone is drinking after class.
ANDREW BERTAINA
For me, facts were something to deploy in a conversation, which would hopefully achieve the intended effect of making other people think I was smart.
That’s morally bankrupt, she said.
That reminds me, I answered, I was just listening to a podcast about the cause of the financial depression in 2008, but she’d already turned on an old episode of Parts Unknown where people were building walls to keep other people out, the same old human story.
I thought we could go on like that forever. After downing several glasses of wine in the evening, I often said, we could go on like this forever. Then, suddenly changing course, as my mind often did, I constructed a strange parallel with something I’d read in a science magazine. You know the universe isn’t infinite?
You told me that last week.
In my drunken state, I thought she might like to hear it again, while Anthony Bourdain ate goat on the side of the road and did the complex thing of celebrating and lamenting the human condition, which is probably why I’d always been a little bit in love with him.
In my stupor, though I was wise enough to keep it to myself, I wondered what it would feel like for a person from ancient times to witness us there on an IKEA couch, watching someone travel through a foreign country and eat goat, while I helped myself to a second bottle of wine. We were living as kings or queens would have in the past. I think Louis CK had this insight before he masturbated into the plants, but it still seems germane, the insight, not the plant thing. But we were colossally unhappy, despite the wine, and the couch, and the surfeit of time.
Maybe happiness shouldn’t be the goal then, I said out loud, forgetting my solemn vow of silence.
What would you choose instead? she asked, eyes not leaving the screen.
Money, I answered, glibly.
I fucking hate it when you’re glib, she said.
But the joke was on her because I hated that about myself too.
In the morning, as I drove to my job teaching high school English students, I listened to NPR. Of course, teaching is a generous description of what I was doing. It was more akin to herding cats. Not that I’ve herded cats, but the impression I’ve always gotten is that it’s a difficult business. The point is, I listened to NPR on the way to work, while the dry fields of grass or corn turned browner with each passing day.
I was always listening to NPR in the hopes of having more facts to share at dinner parties, little nuggets of wisdom about the electoral college or voting patterns in large college towns in Georgia, but that day I was struck by something even odder. The story was about a city I’d never heard of. Some place up near the Eastern Shore of Maryland had been experiencing an incredible spate of disappearances.
The best way to describe it, at least according to Steve Inskeep, was that entire city blocks, buildings, schools, trees, kept disappearing and then reappearing elsewhere. It sounded insane, but I remembered the story of an epidemic in the Middle Ages when a nun in a French convent started to meow like a cat, and then all the nuns started to meow like cats, until the whole nunnery was lit up with meows, which was either really interesting, annoying, or beautiful. Maybe it was a cry against God? Or a cry against their lot in the male-dominated world? Honestly, it’s really hard to make sense of a convent full of meowing nuns. It’s probably also hard to herd meowing nuns. I think what I mean is, human beings are kind of fucking weird. Anyway, this story didn’t seem to be like the nuns meowing because it wasn’t limited to a single person or passed along by a contagion. Everyone in the town noticed it, so maybe it was
ANDREW BERTAINA
a collective delusion, like how everyone from my generation remembers the books as Berenstein Bears, when it was apparently Berenstain Bears. Although, what really troubles me there, is why they didn’t call it Bearenstain Bears and get the bear pun out of the way up front?
But my mind was blown away by this story because you had all of these instances of independent corroboration, which seemed to suggest this was the real fucking deal.
At home that night, I told Amy about the story. I said, this feels like the real fucking deal.
She said she was depressed. I gave up briefly on my story and asked her why.
The slashing and cutting of the Amazon rainforests? The melting of the polar ice caps? Fuck all.
I knew she wasn’t wrong about those things, but I couldn’t necessarily see what they had to do with me. I don’t think I’d ever even cut down a tree. I might have uprooted a sapling or two in my day, and I was only getting by on used furniture, which meant the wood had already been cut. I knew the real problem was the trees were being cut down for cattle grazing or something, and the combination of their removal and methane from cow farts was the real issue. But I didn’t say any of this because it was so distant from our couch.
I’m sorry, I said, holding Amy while she felt depressed about things she couldn’t control, which is a thing I used to love about her. But then people are always changing, shifting internally as the weather moves its way across the sky or a murmuration of starlings, making crazy shapes for no discernible reason at all, just for the beauty of it. I knew I could look it up and someone had probably figured out why, but I didn’t care about the facts for that moment. The essential takeaway was that everything changes, and I thought we needed one too.
When Amy was done feeling sad about the polar ice caps, I told her about the City of Probabilities, which is what Steve Inskeep was calling it because the restaurant, or the tree, or your favorite gas station with that cheap gas your dad always told you to get because it was a nickel cheaper even if you had to drive two miles up the road to get it, was usually there, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes the tree or the gas station or the restaurant would be moved across town, set down by some strange magic or mathematical equation, they were trying to figure out which, in a new place. I said it was a matter of probability, where the place would appear next. Mathematicians were very horny to figure out the equation first, but that wasn’t germane here.
For us, the city was on a shining hill. A place of promise, where things were always changing and where people were constantly making accommodations, moving schools or buying a new house to keep up with the ever-shifting dynamics, offered a promise of sorts. We were in a rut, and I thought it could reinvigorate our marriage. It was either that or an all-inclusive resort, and I know how Amy felt about the waste in resorts.
I reminded her that I loathed all the kids I taught at the high school. They don’t give a shit about To the Lighthouse, I said. Can you imagine a worse possible world than not caring about whether James makes it to the lighthouse?
I always thought of James as a little shit.
Me too, I said. And I’d like to have that insight as a class, but they are always updating their phones or they haven’t done the reading.
You hypocrite, she said. You’re always tweeting from your job.
My hypocrisy bothers me less though, which is a thing I’ve noticed about hypocrisy.
Amy didn’t see the point in leaving the city because the ice caps and rainforests and soil PH were still fucked in the City of
Probabilities, probably. And don’t even get me started on kudzu vines, she said.
Within a week, we were packed and heading down to the City of Probabilities. I’d rented us a small condo there that we hoped would still be in the same location by the time we arrived. I’d quit my job mid-year, which was a big no-no for high school teachers and would probably be a long-term stain on my teaching record, but I gave a big speech on the way out, quoting from Derek Parfit and the television show, The Good Place, telling the students about how real relationships and learning are built in a spirit of reciprocity. They were mostly thumbing through their phones, so I switched to metacommentary. The point is, I can’t give a fuck if you don’t. A few of them smiled when I said fuck.
One of them, an earnest kid I’d almost liked, looked up and said, That’s pretty bleak though, right? Like, you all are the one’s who messed everything up and then you want us to fix it.
That’s right, I said. Damn. That’s cold.
The truth was, I didn’t believe their generation would be any better at solving anything than ours had been. The world was a baffling place and every generation thought they had the answer to solving the problem of war, of the coming climate apocalypse, of discrimination of all kinds. And even if things were getting slightly better, I saw, as they all stared at their phones or looked glassy eyed out the window, that it was just another generation who thought they knew better than the ones who came before, and I wanted to say the Greeks and the Bible had it right long ago, the real human sin was pride. But instead of sharing my insight, I told them all to enjoy the coming spring and left.
I think I inspired some of them, I said.
To do what? Amy asked.
No idea, I said. But I’m not a didactic teacher. I just feel like inspiration probably happened.
The sky overhead was electric with heat. White clouds scuttled across the sky, making shapes and formations that were unrecognizable as anything but cloud shapes. The road signs still said we were three hundred miles away, but it was sometimes hard to tell because the kudzu had grown into some of them and was beginning the process of tearing them down.
Neither of us mentioned it though, choosing to see this trip to the city as a new beginning, instead of another jaunt through the hellscape of adult life. Vultures were pinwheeling through the sky overhead, patrolling the roads for signs of a carcass.
Hideous birds, I said.
They’re just doing something nobody else wants to, she said. Watching CBS?
We stayed in a small motel when night started to fall. I wondered if we’d have rough sex in the room, disturb the lady at the front desk with our moaning. If it was going to be one of those kinds of motel nights, but Amy looked very tired and was reading an article in the new issue of Nature about the proliferation of jellyfish and plastic bags. I went to the bathroom and took a long shower, where I briefly tried to masturbate and then lost interest in the project.
By the time I was done, Amy had fallen asleep, and I stood over her, like a murderer in some B movie, watching her breathe, watching the way her hair hung like a curtain of silk around her cheek. I fell in love with her again, in that moment, in the quiet before I too slept.
We were happy, at least for a time, in the City of Probabilities. There was something exciting about being in a place that always changed. It was even more exciting than using a dildo or restraints and less risky than opening up our marriage. We found a bagel place we really loved. The sort of place with really thick, New York style bagels we adored, and a waitress who made these incredible cappuccinos with lavender flowers and Winnie the Pooh doing the gritty as foam toppings. Real top-notch shit. It was the kind of place we’d have gone to every weekend, long after the novelty wore off because it was a place we just liked to go. Until it would have become a routine we somehow loathed, the great bagels, the amazing cappuccino. And because we couldn’t loathe the shop, which we both agreed we loved, we’d have turned to loathing one another.
But then one Saturday, about six months into our time in the City of Probabilities, the shop disappeared. We heard it had suddenly appeared two miles up the road, and it was now far enough away that we couldn’t quite justify driving over there just for a good bagel, when this new place we’d gone to had perfectly reasonable bagels. But still, sometimes we’d yearn for those wonderful New York style bagels, and we’d drive two miles up the road, right by the dusty footpath that someone said was once a river, until we reached the shop and had whatever it was we thought we’d been missing.
On the patio, we’d sit beneath an umbrella in the blistering heat and wonder what it was we’d seen in the bagels in the first place.
They don’t even have the special water it takes to make a true New York City bagel, I said. These are just cheap knockoffs. The cappuccino girl was gone, and Amy complained about the design in hers. It’s just a misshapen heart.
Aren’t they all, I said? But she didn’t laugh.
* * *
I thought the novelty might be enough to keep us afloat.
If Noah can last three months on the arc with only a bunch of animals to talk to, we can last at least thirty years in this place. Did Noah have a wife?
That checks out or bestiality was going to be an issue.
It’s hard to imagine all that rain falling from any sky. Wars were being fought elsewhere over water rights, but it was countries away from us. Reservoirs were low, but they’d always been low, and I had infinite faith in the capacity of humanity to plunder the earth for as long as we could. Amy seemed to think it was still vital to save the world. The rest of us had accepted we couldn’t save the world, and it was becoming increasingly clear we weren’t going to be able to save ourselves either.
I had a job at a junior high, herding cats again. Though they were called the Mustangs. None of the kids knew what a Mustang was. The new school either called my references from the high school and didn’t care about what they’d said about me, or they didn’t care enough to call my references. In truth, I was pleased either way. The students there weren’t any more engaged than the students I’d taught in the other school. I taught in this large brutalist structure, a concrete monolith with dark classrooms, lined by dark carpet and windows that had been tinted as though natural light was a punishment inflicted on humans. I made a joke about Plato’s cave on the first day and then stared out into a lot of blank faces, which comforted me. Know your audience.
In that way, I found the experience almost bearable. It felt like the students and I weren’t so much at odds. I remembered what it was like to be fourteen, the eroticism of everything, being terrified the teacher would call on me to pick up the calculators when I had a raging hard-on. It had been awful. So, I didn’t care as much
if they didn’t want to discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, often didn’t even journal about their feelings. I’d gone soft. It was hard enough to be fourteen. I never called on anyone to pick up the books. I just let them sit there between classes, hoping no one took off with a copy of Frankenstein.
Before she fell in love, Amy worked at a coffee shop. Sometimes I’d go there on my lunch break, and she’d make me an elaborate drink.
I’ll take the usual, I’d say, and she’d hold up the line forever or close the store while making me the drink, with a tableau of environmental destruction playing out on the top of the cup, trees burning, fish dying on the shores of the river, polar bears with slats for ribs wandering on thin patches of ice. These artistic renderings were really quite wonderful, and if she’d had any artistic desire in her life, I saw that she could monetize this gift.
You really ought to be making money off this, I told her. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s fucking depressing. And I’d sit on the dusty back patio while a few little sparrows sifted trash, content in this new phase of life, the sparrows and I.
She lost her job before we could make anything off it though. These creations often took her upwards of an hour and a manager noticed she often closed the store when she was deep into her work. And he told her the drinks were scaring off the customers. They preferred hearts, he told her. She felt it went against her artistic and moral principles.
In the aftermath, I reminded Amy that no one in this country has ever given a damn about art, which is the sort of insight I’d still like to share with all of my students, but they didn’t give a damn about art either.
What do you think you’ll do next I asked, Amy, now that your artistic ambition has been thwarted?
I might try and do something to fix the world, she said.
Oh, Sisyphus, I said. But I’d made a lot of jokes about Sisyphus over the years, and they all fell flat.
In truth, I thought I’d stay in the City of Probabilities for the rest of my life, with gas stations and Quik E Marts, Chuck E. Cheese parking lots and sad oak trees winking in and out of existence. For me, the place was Paradise. It provided a cover for the essential problem of my life, which is that I’d failed to transition properly into adulthood. Other people had bought giant houses and begun to have children or gone overseas to fight in wars or plunder the earth, but I hadn’t found the right path. The city was a camouflage for me, an excuse to change without ever having to lift a finger.
But all good things must come to an end said someone at some point in time. Amy took a new job at a non-profit where they advocated against large oil companies and plastic manufacturers. It was thankless work, obviously doomed to fail, which brought her out of the deep funk she’d been in. Instead, the sheer absurdity of a four-person office bringing down BP or Shell seemed to invigorate her. She stayed long hours at the office and came back with a feverish intensity, raving to me about a grant she’d applied for or an op-ed she was writing for the local newspaper, an interview she’d given to a reporter.
Woah, woah, I said. What does this have to do with Woolf’s use of the symbol of water in The Waves to show it as a life-giving spirit of change?
But she had no interest in my rendering of the world.
I’m going out to cut kudzu with Mike, she said. Who the fuck was Mike, I asked myself, over and over, after she left, drinking a beer and watching a basketball game I’d recorded and then accidentally Googled already, such that I already knew
the final score but found myself watching it anyway, hoping the final score would change. When the game ended, I stood on the porch and looked at the white, heat-blasted sky.
Who the fuck is Mike, I asked the clouds, who were silent and cagey as always. I thought about waiting them out, but the wine was inside, and I had lost interest in the question myself.
The truth is, before you get married, you read the statistics about how happy people are and what the probability is that you’ll get divorced or end up miserable. Sometimes I think no one would get married if they wanted to be happy. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to think that people who were single were happy either. Amy had said the number of happy couples, when divorce and other measures were taken into account, was somewhere around twenty-five percent. And just like every other stupid couple, we thought we’d be that one in four, and for a while, I could have sworn we were. * * *
I’d read lots of books where someone fights vociferously for a woman, a man, a partner in life, but I couldn’t quite come up with a proper plan for winning Amy back. Ocean’s Eleven was useless in helping me to solve things. I had no friends in this city, and I knew nothing about gambling. Instead, I got drunk a lot and started playing games of Life against myself as I’d done when I was a kid. I still loved the spinning wheel, the way it whirred and made a noise almost like a buzz saw. This, unfortunately, did not win Amy back, no matter how many times I made it to millionaire mansion. Weeks passed, maybe even months. Amy was really good at her job.
Have the algae blooms stopped? Aren’t blooms supposed to be beautiful?
At school, it got so hot that the kids seemed to lose interest in being horny and just sat around listlessly while we read aloud from The Great Gatsby. It was way above their reading level, but I had wanted to reread it myself, so I’d added it to our core books under the auspices of a journey into advanced reading.
Flies buzzed all over the room and Gatsby was still lusting around after Daisy.
This is kind of boring, a student said.
It’s one of the greatest American novels, I countered.
This? They looked at me despairingly, knowing that if this book was a promise of adult greatness, then things were looking pretty dire.
Amy said she was going to a happy hour, and I agreed to go for once, hoping to meet Who the Fuck is Mike. When I came in, she was already sitting, chatting with someone, a handsome guy with intense blue eyes and a very nice beard. My beard had always been scraggly, slightly misshapen. I think, years ago, it was something Amy had probably loved about me too. But now I saw her, laughing at this guy’s jokes, her eyes full of merriment, so delighted by his very full beard.
I sat down next to them, and the waiter showed up, asking if I’d like any bottled water. I knew better than to say yes, to contribute one more iota of plastic that would be swimming around in a whale’s belly, but I said, I’ll take two, actually and watched the look of disdain my wife exchanged with him.
This is Mike, she said.
I’ve heard a lot about you, I said. Like, an awkward amount. I think Amy might know you better than she knows me.
Mike smiled back weakly, his eyes cutting to Amy’s in a panic.
It wasn’t really my personality to make a scene like this, but I figured I’d never see this guy again because after he and Amy
started fucking, I was going to block her on all my socials and move out west to pan for gold.
You’re embarrassing yourself, Amy said, which is precisely the sort of thing she’d never worried about when we’d first met.
I’m sorry, I said. Give me a minute. I looked at Who the Fuck is Mike’s fantastic beard, pushed away from the table and walked toward the gate. I glanced over my shoulder to see Amy shrugging her shoulders and mouthing, I told you so. I thought of what I could say to fix things, to make the night go away, but then I remembered the way she’d been looking at him before she’d noticed me and stopped dreaming. In the distance, I swore I heard the sound of thunder, the distant promise of rain.
I walked two blocks past a pair of barking dogs, snarling up against chain link fences. The houses were low slung, ranch style, and in the distance, what was left of the shore. Once, storks and herons had strutted around these parts, dipping their great beaks into still waters rich with minnows. Now, there was a long line of mud stretching out as far as I could see. I took a deep breath, knowing I’d have to face whatever came next, wondering if I had the will to finally fight for something.
When I walked back two blocks, past the same two snarling dogs, making the same racket as though it would change anything, I looked for the restaurant, and it was gone—the iron chairs, the large wooden tables, the charcuterie board, the dying oak. Amy and Who the Fuck is Mike disappeared too, moved across town to a place I knew I’d never be able to find.
The thunder rumbled again, and a gauzy green light came with it, filling the space in the sky where there had once been marshlands. From across the illusion of water, I could see the green light moving, coming toward me, like some awful dream in full bloom.