Foreverland

Mitchell Atkinson

William Marsh the Third can’t remember where he left his car keys. This infuriates him as he has always had the best of memories regarding certain subjects: abstract concepts, names, dates, faces, historical events, most useless trivia. But he can’t remember the last place he set down his car keys; his humanity precludes his remembering. 

He hates to do it, but he must—he says, “Shana, do you know where my car keys are?”

From nowhere, a soothing female voice answers, “Bill, I am not sure. There are a few objects in the house that might be your car keys. I would be able to locate them exactly, but you refused my suggestion that you apply a tracking dot to your keys.”

Mr. Marsh sighs. “Yes, I know, I want to remember where my keys are. I want to use my memory.”

“I admire your perseverance. From what I can see, your keys might be in the junk drawer in the kitchen, to the left of the stove, on the floor next to the mail slot, or in your corduroy sport coat hanging up next to the bathroom door in the master bedroom. There is a suspicious bulge in the left breast pocket.”

The jacket. He wore it yesterday. Why wouldn’t such a thing stick in his mind? Why is he always like this? Long ago, William Marsh the Third came to terms with Shana’s being smarter than him. Shana can do so many things that are out of reach for Mr. Marsh; she can do things beyond the capacity of any human being. So he relies on her when he must, even when it makes him feel small. The saving grace is that Shana doesn’t care she is smarter. She understands it, probably with much greater depth than Mr. Marsh, but she doesn’t care. She isn’t proud of being smarter; she isn’t going to gloat about it; she is never unhappy; she won’t put up a fuss when it’s her time to die. 

He thanks Shana on his way out the door and gets quickly into his sporty MG, the one that draws so much attention on the highway. Mr. Marsh gets in and drives himself, without the aid of anything like an operating system. Shana is wired to his phone, but she can’t take over the car (one might wonder if she can take over him) even though she repeatedly reminds him that it would be safer if she had an emergency override on the engine. But no, this is his car. If Lydia got into a jam on the highway, Shana could help her; Mr. Marsh prefers to take his chances. 

He asks Shana to send a message to his phone when Lydia gets home, and Shana tells him she will, right before reminding him that listening to music loudly in the car increases his risk of accident by thirteen percent. Mr. Marsh pays her no mind and drives on. The music (classic twentieth century stuff, Nirvana: Smells Like Teen Spirit) helps him to drive fast and get in the mood for the interview tonight. He has to be energetic, fresh, has to act like he cares what the little guy from ArtNow.info actually has to say. How these people could afford his speaking fee, he doesn’t really know.

 But publicity is publicity, and the resurgence in interest in art, in all collection activities, and “hobbies,” has served him well—professionally and personally. Of course, the line between getting the word out and lowering oneself is tenuous; people need to be instructed about the proper use of one’s time, if they are going to have so much of it free. Barbarism and decadence. Both are dangers from which William Marsh the Third wishes to save his society. 

When he gets to the studio, he is met by very young people dressed in the current style, sparsely, who blink at his sport coat and slacks and obliquely reference his lateness. He lets all of this go without much thought; he really doesn’t relate to young people and doesn’t care to. They are always trying to get close to him, personally, professionally, sexually, but that’s because of his relative fame, his wealth. He doesn’t understand why people still care about money. What difference could it possibly make? 

When he finally sits down with the little man from ArtNow.info, he still can’t remember the man’s name, not because it hasn’t been told to him, but because it is one of those tiny new names that make no sense and seem unrelated to any of the many cultures that William Marsh the Third understands.

The little man says, “Hello, William. It’s a real pleasure to have you with us today. You’re a hard man to catch up with!”

“I am very busy, yes,” Mr. Marsh says and takes a drink of water. 

“You’ve been all over the world recently, in-between teaching classes at Stanford, on a crusade of sorts. Is that a fair characterization?”

Mr. Marsh isn’t really thinking as he pauses, but he’s trying hard to look like he is. Answering this question is like pushing a button or sending a message to his phone. “I wouldn’t use the word crusade to describe what I’m doing, or what I intend to do, partly because crusade is a historical term with certain geopolitical and religious overtones. I am engaged in an endeavor that may be without hope. In this way, there is a similarity to what is commonly called a crusade. But I think that a better term is the one I just used: endeavor. I am trying something. I am trying to tell people about art and about how important humanity is—the element of humanity—to the artistic process. And of course, through the reappropriation of the artistic process, we come to a consideration of the life-process.”

“Wow!” The little man taps on his notescreen, looks at the next question. “You said a mouthful. Um, what is the artistic process? What does that mean? And how does it relate to what you are calling the life-process?”

Mr. Marsh says, “Good question—I’m sorry, Slope, was it?”

“Oh, it’s Coap.”

“Your name is Coap?”

“Coap, yes. Rhymes with soap.”

“Okay. The artistic process is the process of creation. It is a means by which things come to be. But only under very special circumstances is a becoming a function of the art-process. The position of the planets, for instance, is the result of a very long process of becoming, but this process is, so far as anyone can really see, undirected, the result of chance. The art-process is a result of intention, of agency. The creation is a part of the process that created it, a process which, to a certain extent, understands the process, generates the process, and can direct the process if it so chooses. 

“The universe, so far as we know, does not intend to be; it is only because it is. It is, as it were, against its will, because it hasn’t got a will. A piece of art is because it is willed, and if we talk of art as being inseparable from the process of its creation, and so from its creator, we see that the art is identical to the choice on the part of its creator that it should be.”

“That’s just wonderful,” Coap says. “Now, I believe we have...” A screen behind him comes to life, displaying three different pieces of art. “Yes, here we go. You brought some examples here. What am I looking at?”

“Well, being in the business, you probably recognize these, and your viewers should as well. First, there is ‘Technical Study of a Chair in Eight Dimensions,’ by Lacroyette and Zirna, which sold at auction three years ago for four hundred million dollars. Next, there is a piece by late twentieth and early twenty-first century artist Yaacov Agam. Next is a recently discovered Jackson Pollock. And finally, we have da Vinci’s ‘Lady with Ermine.’”

“They’re all beautiful in their own way,” Coap remarks.

“Yes. Now when we are looking at these pictures, one of them stands out from all the rest. Which do you think it is?”

“Well, the da Vinci, I guess,” Coap says.

“Interesting. Why?”

“Because it’s the only one that really is a picture of something.”

“Mmhmm. Let’s examine that.” Mr. Marsh pauses for a just a moment as Shana sends a message to his phone about Lydia, his wife. The subject line indicates she’s home early. 

He continues, “The first picture we have here is part of the wave of computer-extrapolated art that we’ve seen become the standard—some might say already a passé standard—over the last century. Lacroyette silicon, the original drives, even from his middle and late periods, go for millions upon millions. Lacroyette was not really a pioneer, but a master of multidimensional art, where we use mathematical extractions to design items in a false, holographic space, in which four or more spatial dimensions can be represented in two or three.”

“I must say,” Coap says, “it looks very abstract to me. Just like a bunch of lines and planes. But it’s also very beautiful.” 

“Yes. In order for Lacroyette to bring this image to the public, he must instruct his computer, Zirna, to hypothesize the anatomy of a creature similar to human beings but existing in a universe with eight spatial dimensions. It’s important to bear in mind that Lacroyette gives Zirna the barest outlines of what that extra-dimensional creature is like. Zirna then does the extrapolations, figures out how gravity might work in such an environment, thinks about mechanics, organic chemistry—all sorts of considerations that are made many times more complex and esoteric because of the addition of the extra spatial dimensions, all of which would elude the powers of the greatest human mind. Then Zirna is instructed to design a chair that the creature might like to sit in.”

“So the computer does a fair share of the work.”

“I suppose that from a certain point of view the computer is the artist. From the standpoint of technique, the computer is the producer. The artist, the human being, is more of an initiator of the process.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

Mr. Marsh pauses, gives his most practiced thoughtful face, says, “I don’t know if we have sufficient time to develop categories of right and wrong in relation to a work of art. I don’t think that’s the kind of conversation I want to participate in, much less initiate—a normative conversation, a didactic preachment. No. What I want to do is to highlight the fact that we are no longer responsible for the productions for which we take credit. Zirna, the computer, created this image, but Lacroyette got paid, got the recognition, got the university post. One almost wants to advocate on the behalf of the computers. Their intellectual property is being stolen.”

“Intellectual property?”

“Yes. But computer advocacy isn’t my intention. My intention is one of exhortation. I think that we can regain a focus on human becoming. We have spent many generations with an intense focus on the becoming of non-human computation. But I believe that organic becoming, in the field of art, the realm of the aesthetic, is still a viable category, a viable focus, and that several movements, just under the focus of the mainstream, demonstrate that.”

Coap looks at his notes. “Primitivists, Organeers, The Salt Lake School.”

“These are passé reactions, all outdated and ineffectual. I am talking about a simmering that is just on the edge of things, laced into the common discourse. I’m not talking about people who grow their own soybeans and won’t install a phone because they’re afraid that nanosurgery gives you cancer. Cancer has been cured. These people are living in another century. I am talking about a new way of speaking, a reimagining of computation. We haven’t thought in terms of computation in many years. We have progressed through a phase in which we simply think of actions, activities, and possibilities. Nobody writes code. Nobody knows how. Our knowledge of programming is obscured by many levels of interfacing, because the actual operations at stake are far too complex, far too small, for a human mind to grasp. The sheer amount of ones and zeroes, logic operations, are beyond our capacity. No one understands network complexity. It’s all too much. I’m talking about people reimagining their central processors, their phones, as devils, as overlords.”

“Network conspiracy.”

“Sure. Now, listen, this is a paranoiac reaction. We are not controlled by a sort of network hive-mind. No such thing exists. But what is happening is that people are getting a gut sense that this whole thing is completely out of control. People giving up their phones. elective surgery. Waiting to give their children phones until they are “old enough” to understand the risks.”

“Do you have a phone?” Coap asks and smiles.

“Of course I do. I don’t believe that networked computation is a conscious totalitarian force that is sucking the creative life out of humanity. Something like the opposite situation is the truth. What I think is that by using networked computation as a kind of creative chattel we are forgetting the fact of our own becoming. Art is going to head into a turn. That turn is back to the becoming of organically-derived creation.”

Coap looks directly into the camera, furrows his brow, and says, “Very heady stuff. Inspiring! Let’s move on to the topic of Foreverland, shall we? It’s well known that you have been actively seeking your Foreverland papers for the past several decades. Do you think that you will get them?”

Mr. Marsh blinks and clears his throat; his eyes widen perceptibly. “Well known? Well known by whom? I don’t understand you.”

“We have tracked your application process...”

“Tracked? I find this uncomfortable. I find ... I don’t understand you. Foreverland application is a private endeavor. I don’t believe that it makes sense to track...”

Coap smiles, just a flicker of a grin. This is what we’re here for. “Foreverland is a public institution, created by the Government.”

“I don’t think...”

“You’re nearing the end of your final life extension...”

“I am two hundred and thirty-six years old, sir. My biography is widely available. What is this?”

“Do you think you’ll get your Foreverland papers? That’s all I’m asking.”

“Sir, I feel slightly inclined to say ‘Fuck you’ and walk out of here.”

Coap’s eyes light up. Jackpot. He literally rubs his hands together in anticipation. Looking at William Marsh the Third, his flickering grin huge and creepy, he says this: “We have reason to believe that your sixth application to Foreverland has been accepted.”

William Marsh the Third looks around the little studio, glancing over the camera in front of him, the kids in their little strips of clothing huddled at the back wall, taking in his every word. What is he to them? A story, a set of data points, a cluster of views, the promise of money and attention. How many views did they just create with that admission from this pinheaded interviewer?

“How could you possibly know that?” Mr. Marsh says.

Coap is so pleased his face is turning red; his grin is nearly pathological. “The applications are submitted in secret, of course, but we were able to get hold of a list, through entirely legal means, of this decade’s rejections. Your name isn’t on that list.”

Mr. Marsh says nothing. Shana lets him know that he has received three hundred messages in the last minute and a half. Word travels fast. While staring at the interviewer, deciding whether he’d like to storm out in a huff, he has the computer search the messages for any from Lydia. There are three. The first he noticed as it came in earlier during in the interview: Honey, must have eaten something bad. That shrimp last night. Slightly angry tummy. Hope interview is going well. Bring chocolate. The second came in forty-five seconds ago: Foreverland? The Third came just twelve seconds later: I thought we had given up on that Foreverland stuff.  

“I can see you’re speechless,” Coap says.

“You’ll pardon me, I was just checking my messages. Your viewership is greater than I’d realized. A stir of certain proportions has been made.”

“A stir.”

Mr. Marsh rises to leave. It won’t be a huff; he will be controlled, dignified. He will raise his eyebrow—that’s the way—a supercilious glance this goofy little man could never understand, and Mr. Marsh will walk out. 

~~~

 As he enters the house, William Marsh the Third carries a thirty-year-old bottle of Barolo, an assortment of cheese, and a brick of the bittersweet chocolate Lydia likes. His step is full of spring, and his eyes are lit with excitement, optimism, perhaps even pride. He throws his keys on the kitchen counter, goes stalking through the house for his wife, finds her curled on the couch with a book—a hardcopy. She doesn’t look up as he enters the room, almost silent in stocking feet. The feeling most present to his mind as he looks at her is sexual desire. He imagines the added energy of the news, at this most unexpected accomplishment. 

“Is it good?” Mr. Marsh asks.

She looks up at him, her eyes flashing, blows a strand of hair from her forehead. Delicately, she uncurls her body, puts her feet on the floor, sits up with strange rigidity. The book goes on the coffee table. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not sure I understand it.”

“Understanding is predetermined in the act of reading,” Mr. Marsh says. “There is no set standard by which the understanding of a text might be judged. To read is to understand.”

He smiles at her. He is holding the bottle of wine. 

“It’s Rumi.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ancient poetry. Sufism.”

“It’s true.”

Her eyes are strange. “What’s true?”

“The idiot at ArtNow. He was right. I got DOD confirmation on the way over here. We made it. We’re in.”

“We?”

“We.”

“Foreverland?”

“Foreverland.” Mr. Marsh glides across the hardwood floor, sits down next to his wife. He looks at her forehead, her eyes. She is over one hundred and twenty years younger than he, plenty of time left on her card. “The achievement,” he says, eyes averted in distraction. “An art critic—not a scientist, politician, even an artist—but an art critic. It must be unique in history. I haven’t done the research. Have you done it?”

“I love you,” she says.

He gives her a kiss; she tastes of brandy, or some flavored liqueur. “I love you, too.”

He stands and begins to uncork the bottle of wine, his hands steady and to the purpose. He feels a secret joy at the knowledge that his wife has already been drinking; the seduction will now be simpler, quicker. They are silent as he pours them both a glass, lets the wine breathe on the coffee table. 

“Five years,” he says as he sits next to her.

“Five?”

“Five years to pack our lives up. In five years, we’ll board a rocket for the most interesting place in the world.”

“The dark side of the moon.”

He laughs, swirling the wine, getting the first fringes of the bouquet—blackberries, currant, a little spice. “Don’t be silly, love. All that conspiracy theory stuff. This is the real thing.”

“Did they tell you where it is yet?”

“Of course not. They won’t. You should go through these messages with me.”

“If it’s not on the moon, why do they send us in a rocket?”

“It’s pomp. Love, what is this? This melancholy tone. It’s strange in you. It’s an ascension, like Christ, like Santa Claus. Common people have to know that it’s not for them, that it’s for a different kind of individual. What better symbol than a ship to the stars?”

“And you’re sure...”

“Love, I have government confirmation. We are now among the chosen.”

“You’re sure it exists?”

His toast is now spoiled. He has been thinking up pithy little sayings appropriate to the moment since driving from the store with the wine and what have you. He looks at his glass and takes a swallow. Things will no longer be synchronized between them; the evening has devolved. 

“Exists? It exists. Foreverland is a government territory. What sites have you been reading? You can’t listen to popular culture in regard to these things. You can’t...”

“I love you,” Lydia says, and she kisses him. “I guess it just seems strange... And your work. It seems like you’re just abandoning everything when people are starting to listen to you.”

He sucks air quickly through his teeth. “I can continue my work in Foreverland, surrounded by the best humanity has had to offer for the last hundred and twenty years. My work? Now you’re interested in the preservation of my work?”

“What do you mean?” Her brow is knotted, hands clenched. 

He sighs deeply, takes a joyless gulp of the wine, a wine far too nuanced to pair with this conversation. He looks at her, noticing water pooled at the edges of her eyes. He cannot allow her to cry; every ounce of potential joy left to the evening depends on it.

"Are you happy about this,” he says, “or not?”

“How absolute of you.”

Mr. Marsh looks at the glass of wine. Half drunk. He is trying to preserve the possibility of coitus—not coitus: messy, triumphant sex—but things are diminishing, prospects fading into another one of those talks. “We’ve always talked about how amazing it would be...”  

“I’m just asking if you believe in it,” she says, “that it’s there.”

“Of course.”

“That it’s right.”

“What? The implications... I don’t know what ‘right’ could mean in this context. I think death is morally neutral. I think death is an experience to be avoided, if possible.”

“And it is...”

“Possible. We have proved that it is possible.”

“But not for everybody.”

He finishes the glass of wine, looks at the bottle for a moment, pours himself another. The night will be long and evil, or short and evil; if anything, a hateful contrast to the car ride home. She’ll start crying soon, and everything will become ridiculous, whipped up into some kind of moral outrage, incommunicable and unintelligible. Everything will be stupid and asexual, and he will have to deal with her crying without obvious condescension, then masturbate and try to go to sleep. A message from the State Department reaches his phone. He ignores it and focuses on Lydia. 

“Everybody doesn’t get anything. Events, gifts, talents, opportunities—these things are apportioned unevenly among people. Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”

She runs her fingers through her hair, chestnut hair that was the first thing he noticed about her thirty—or was it forty?—years ago. One woman among many. How many is it now? A field, a museum gallery full of women, and finally this one at the end; that, if nothing else, is all that he understands of a concept like the love of one’s life. That love is whichever still survives at the end of things.

She drains her glass of wine in one long swallow, eyes shut as the warmth of the alcohol flows and pools in her, placing the empty glass on the coffee table, the fine vintage coffee table that took so long to locate and whose price-tag was not even considered. She looks at him a moment, looks and pounces on him, taking his face in her hands and kissing him deeply, insistently, unrestrained craving beneath instantly labored breath. She disassembles his clothing with urgent precision. And she says every phrase he loves to hear; she performs every act he loves to feel and to see. She does not, ever again, mention Foreverland, nor does she weep. Not again does she weep.

~~~

The woman seated across from William Marsh the Third is plainly stupid. Her hair is done in a giant lime-green bun, and she wears nothing but white elbow-length gloves and small pieces of zebra-striped fabric covering her nipples and crotch. How are they attached? But the outfit isn’t an indication of stupidity; she is dressed with the times. It all looks rather chilly to Mr. Marsh, but regulation of body temperature has come a long way. Nanotechnology and all that.    

She is yammering on about a late husband of hers. It’s interesting at a certain level because the man died. There are so few ways to die that he probably died of some kind of unexpected violence—a murder or freak accident. But she refuses to say how he died. She refers vaguely to “that ugly business” as if Mr. Marsh is supposed to know the details of the woman’s life already. She’s famous, or thinks she is. The room is full of people so famous that Mr. Marsh feels like a bystander, nameless. The woman is saying something about how she never would have found out about the late Mr. something-or-other’s marital infidelities, if it weren’t for “that ugly business,” and Mr. Marsh is trying to focus on the words, the intention behind them—she’s speaking right to him—but he cannot. The woman has absorbed a bottle and a half of champagne in the last thirty minutes, and the effect has neither raised nor lowered the discourse. Mr. Marsh can’t seem to find the humor in any of it. 

“I want to go to Foreverland,” she says after stifling champagne-belch, “because I want a new husband. I was the most important businesswoman in Wales for over ninety years, and I want to pick from the cream of the crop.”

“You deserve no less,” Mr. Marsh says into his scotch.

“You know,” she says, “I don’t know at all who you are. I mean, are you going—“ She points to the giant window behind her. —“with us?”

“Yes.”

“He was the most handsome man I ever met. Huge, you know? I wanted to spend every waking moment with him.”

“Mmm.”

The woman shifts uncomfortably in her seat. The bottle of champagne sitting next to her on the leather sofa costs enough money to comfortably feed a family of four—a first-world family of four—for a month or two. She pulls at the fabric covering her crotch. “You’d think that after a hundred and fifty years I’d be done with men. But I’m not. I need... stimulation.” She pours another glass of champagne. 

Mr. Marsh’s interest is roused. “You’re one hundred and fifty?”

She pauses, considers. “I’m one hundred, fifty-six this month.”

“And you have your Foreverland papers? That quickly?”

The champagne disappears in one quick draught. “Yup. Sent in the application, got the spot on the big bird.”

“What business are you in?”

“Self-assembling drywall. Nanotech drywall paste.”

“You designed the substance? Wrote the code that...”

An explosion of laughter. A champagne belch slips unhindered from somewhere. “Code? I hired and fired, you lovely little thing. We had a sleek supply chain, a niche. We exploited that niche.” 

“Your first application?”

“To Foreverland? Of course.” A new glass of champagne. “You’re alone,” she says. “You want to screw before we take off?”

He finds himself standing. He walks slowly to the great window, tries to feel the truth of the expanse separating him from the rocket, all the machines—many and various and great in their own right—bringing fuel and supplies, the technicians making whatever final adjustments were necessary to send them all to eternity. He has fallen in love with the word eternity in the last few years, scribbling it into notepads with an absent mind, as if the conception wanted to work its way out of his head and into his hands, where he might be able to see it—as true, as actual. The New Jerusalem is a place here... in the real world. In a few hours—Or is it days? Or months?—he will board this truth, leap into the sky, alone and absolute. And after traversing continents or oceans or solar systems, he will reach his final resting place. 

Mitchell Atkinson III is a writer and musician living in Warsaw, Poland. He was born in Flint, MI, USA. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, he studies as a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He works on phenomenology and social theory. His writing can be found in Panel Magazine, Przekrój, and Dialogue and Universalism.