A History of What Comes Next

INTRODUCTION

We were the Ninety-Eight.

Ahmet found my diary while going through my luggage. It was my fault; I never should have let him come. He said he had questions he needed answered. I could see in his eyes that he had read things he should not have read.

We were Armenian traders in Berlin. Germany has spent decades waging Kulturkampf against the Catholic church. Jews, well… There’s never been a good time to be Jewish in Germany. In all fairness, 1910 seemed like a bad time to be anything, but we had to be something. Orthodox Christians from a place few had ever heard of was the safest box we could fit ourselves in.

Mother was wise in choosing Berlin. The cultural scene was unlike anything we’d ever seen, and there wasn’t a place on Earth with a larger appetite for science. Berlin was hungry for it all. It was the most modern city in the world. It even had a subway, which served us well since Mother didn’t drive. She thought owning a car would make us stand out. We were coffee merchants, which seemed a bit cliché, but people find comfort in the familiar. We owned a small shop in Kreuzberg and the three-story building that housed it. We lived upstairs from the store and Mother set up our laboratory in the third-floor apartment that we pretended to rent.

Ahmet was a scholar from the Ottoman Empire. We met at the shop. I was thirty years old, but Ahmet did not mind my age. He did not mind my daughter Sara. She was almost five when we moved to Berlin. He did not mind that I had a passion for science. He did not mind that I spent my free time in a secret room full of strange contraptions, and he never asked about our past after I told him not to. I did not mind Ahmet. We were married within a year.

Ahmet treated us well. He was a kind and honorable man, kind being the operative word. There were lots of honorable men in those days. When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Serbian nationalists, honorable men in Austria declared war on Serbia. Honorable men in Russia did what honorable men do: they honored their treaty with Serbia. The honorable thing to do for Germany was to stand with Austria. France sided with Russia, because it, too, had honor. Seventeen million lives later, the war was over, everyone’s honor intact.

Mother died during the war. She hanged herself after breakfast on a crisp April morning in 1915. She thought it was our time, my daughter and me. There can never be three for too long.

Mother had performed her duty well, as her mother did before her. She and I were the Ninety-Seven. My daughter and I were now the Ninety-Eight. I had learned all that I was to learn and I had set a path for myself as instructed. I was as certain of what was expected of me as I was of the sun coming up every day. That certainty would not last. While removing Mother’s personal items from the laboratory, I stumbled upon a box of papers I had never seen. In it were handwritten notes and a dozen scientific papers from the previous century. There was a brilliant paper from 1824 by French mathematician Joseph Fourier in which he calculated the temperature of an Earth without an atmosphere, another by John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, about the effect of certain gases on infrared radiation. The one that caught my attention was from an electrochemist, of all people, a man by the name of Svante Arrhenius. In 1896, he had presented at the Stockholm Physical Society a paper titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” In it, he performed calculations on the effect of increased or decreased CO₂ concentrations on the temperature of Earth. I was not so much interested in the paper itself as I was in the countless scribbles my mother had added, no doubt over years, judging by the different inks she used.

Mother had spent most of her life working in physics. Her passion was electromagnetic waves, but like all of us she also spent a fair amount of time dabbing in anything from astrophysics to propulsion and flight dynamics. One year before I was born—I suspect the moment she decided it was time to bear a child—Mother had copied all her notes on EM waves and sent them to a promising student at the University of Berlin. From then on, she would sporadically perform new experiments but spent a good portion of her time collecting and analyzing air samples. She had regular correspondence with professors at various universities doing the same at her request, and carefully logged thirty years of data from across Europe inside notebooks. Mother was a brilliant physicist. This was tedious, unrewarding work at best. Why would she waste her time caring about the weather?

I found the answer in her diary. Mother was worried we would run out of time. If carbon dioxide levels kept rising, plant life, and soon all life on this world, would eventually come to an end. She wanted to know how fast it was happening and whether or not we could do anything about it. If Earth was doomed, her life, and that of the ninety-seven that came before her, had been a colossal waste of time. She had read our journals, felt the pain and sacrifice of each of her ancestors. She had watched her mother die. Was all of it for nothing? Every cell in her body was aching for an answer. She needed to know if our lives meant anything.

Answering that question also became my life’s work. I make it sound like it was a calling. It was not, at least not at first. The war had infused my mother with a deep sense of urgency. I was still a child when it ended, and what suffering I remembered served as a reminder to enjoy every moment. For me, our lives were about the journey, not the destination. I took up Mother’s research as a pastime. I spent most of my days teaching Sara everything I knew, a task that proved much more challenging than what I had imagined. This was my way to escape, like scrapbooking or playing biritch. Perhaps more than anything, it was something I could share with Ahmet. I will never know if it was the work he enjoyed or my opening up to him—I like to think it was both—but he poured himself into it. He was with me the whole time. He helped collect samples. He even traveled to France to get a better spectrophotometer. For nearly twenty years, he was a competent assistant, a constant supporter, a faithful husband. He was also a great father to my daughter.

On the eighteenth day of July 1925, Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf, and Sara gave birth to our granddaughter. We named her Mi’a, the Arabic word for one hundred. When the New York stock market crashed in 1929, we knew it was time to go. Hitler’s popularity was on the rise, and the United States would undoubtedly pull back all the loans it had made this country after the war. Hell was coming to Germany.

We had to leave earlier than expected. Mi’a was only seven at the time. In hindsight, it was a blessing. Hindenburg won the election in April of that year but it wouldn’t last. Hitler would soon take power. We left in September. 1932 was the year of everything.

Amelia Earhart completed her solo flight across the Atlantic. We were ecstatic. It was one of many things that inched us closer to our goal that year, but mostly we were indulging in a bit of vicarious living. None of us had ever been on a plane.

Across the Atlantic, Karl Jansky detected radio waves coming from space. To Sara and me, it was as if we’d found a window to a whole new place. We could see more of what was out there, expand our knowledge of the universe. We spent entire evenings speculating about what we could find. What would the death of a star sound like if we could hear those frequencies? What kind of radio signal would a whole civilization be putting out? We designed radio telescopes in our minds and imagined giant dishes aimed at the sky, searching for life.

What else? They discovered the neutron, finally. I’ll admit, it was somewhat less exciting than watching a woman fly across Earth or eavesdropping on aliens. It was a whole lot less exciting for my granddaughter. Mi’a only talked about crossing the ocean. Nonetheless, particle physics was a lot easier with all the particles. I was happy.

We’ll never know if we played a part in any of these things. Perhaps some of our research from the past… It did not matter. We had an ocean to cross. We boarded the SS Milwaukee of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie on September 18, didn’t tell a soul. The trip to New York would take eleven days.

On the third day, Ahmet found my diary. He was seasick and going through my luggage, looking for medicine. It was all my fault; I should never have let him come. I could see in his eyes that he had read things he should not have read. I could see he would not let it go. I could see the entire chessboard, and every move led to the same outcome. Checkmate. Panic is knowing there is a way out but not knowing what it is. Calm is the absolute certainty there is not. I smiled. I told him: “We are the Kibsu.” I pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket, put it in his nostril, and drove it into his skull with my palm. I do not think he suffered. I waited until nightfall and I gave his body to the sea.

I won’t tell Sara. Some things are better left unsaid. I left the passports I had made in Berlin on the bed. When we dock at Ellis Island, Sara and Mi’a Balian will be no more. Sarah and Mia Freed will take their first steps into the world. I wish I could see it, that New World, but my time has come and gone. We are the Ninety-Nine now. There can never be three for too long.

A bag of silverware tied around the ankle should be good enough. I think I will wear the blue dress… Ahmet will like that. It was always his favorite.