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forty-two

“You’re going to make a great mother someday,” Matt said in a joking tone. They were down in Caitlin’s basement again; Matt had indeed come over after school, and she’d just helped him clean up a glass of Pepsi he’d accidentally spilled. She was beginning to feel like she was under house arrest—even if it was protective custody.

She smiled, setting aside the towel she’d gone to fetch, but—

But better to get that out of the way right now.

“I’m not going to have kids,” she said, sitting back down on her swivel chair, and cursing again that her parents didn’t have a couch down here.

“Oh!” said Matt. “I’m so sorry. Is it—um, was it the same thing that caused your blindness?”

She was startled—but she supposed she shouldn’t be. Blindness in young people that wasn’t caused by an injury rarely occurred in isolation; it was usually part of a suite of difficulties. In fact, one of the frustrations for her at the TSBVI had been that so many of the students had cognitive difficulties in addition to visual impairment.

“Well,” she said, “first, my blindness was caused by something called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which only affects the way the retina encodes information. And, second, it’s not that I can’t have children, it’s that I don’t want to.”

Caitlin wished yet again that she had more experience at decoding faces. Matt’s expression was one she’d never seen before: the left side of his mouth turned down, the right turned up, and blond eyebrows drawn together; it could have meant anything. After a moment he said, “Don’t you like kids?”

“I like them just fine,” she replied, “but I could never eat a whole one.”

But that expression she did recognize: Matt’s jaw had dropped.

“I’m joking. I love kids. Back in Austin, I used to help Stacy babysit.”

“But you don’t want to have any of your own?”

“Nope.”

And now his eyebrows went up. “Why not?”

“Just never have. Ever since I was a little girl, it was never something I wanted.”

“Didn’t you play with dolls?”

Caitlin still had that ridiculous Barbie Doll her cousin Megan had gotten her as a joke, the one that exclaimed, “Math is hard!”

“Sure,” Caitlin said. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be a mother.”

Matt was silent, and Caitlin felt herself tensing up. For Pete’s sake, they’d only been dating a few days—surely it was way too early to be worrying about this! But if it was going to be a showstopper for Matt…

She made her tone nonconfrontational. “I’ve had this discussion with Bashira, too, you know. She says, ‘How could you not want kids?’ and ‘Aren’t you being selfish?’ and ‘Who’s going to look after you in your old age?’ ”

Matt leaned back in his chair. “And?”

“And, I just don’t want kids; I don’t know why. And, no, I’m not being selfish.” She paused. “Have you ever read Richard Dawkins?”

“I read The God Delusion,” Matt said.

“Yeah, that’s a good one. But his most famous book is The Selfish Gene. And that’s his point: that genes are selfish, that all they want is to reproduce. And it is selfish to reproduce, in a very literal sense: it’s about making more copies of yourself, or as near as is possible, given our, um, our method of reproduction.”

Matt averted his eyes, and said, “Ah.”

“And, as for the looking-after-me-when-I’m-old question, surely that’s a truly selfish reason to have a child: for what it can do for you. Heck, you might as well have one to harvest its youthful organs so you can live longer. After all, they’d likely be a good tissue match.”

“Yuck,” said Matt.

Caitlin smiled. “Exactly.”

“But, um, ah, speaking of genes and stuff… I mean, that’s interesting that you don’t want to have kids. How could, ah…?”

“How could a disposition toward not having children evolve?” asked Caitlin.

Matt nodded. “Exactly. I mean, you’re here because every one of your ancestors wanted to have children.”

Caitlin felt butterflies in her stomach. She had an answer for that, of course, and had had no trouble presenting it to Bashira, but…

She took a breath and found herself now not quite looking at Matt. “Actually, the having-kids part is just a side effect. I’m here because every one of my ancestors liked having sex.”

But even not quite looking at him, she could see another expression she now knew well: the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. “Ah,” he said again. He was clearly nervous, and he quickly changed the topic. “So, um, so what do you think about the upcoming election in the States? ”

Caitlin shook her head; she had her work cut out for her. She wheeled her chair a little closer to his; their knees were now touching. “I hope he gets re-elected,” she said. “My parents have already done the paperwork to be able to vote from Canada.”

Matt nodded. “They’re allowed to vote from here?”

“Sure. They’ll do absentee ballots. They’ll be counted for Austin, which was their last US address.”

“Um, are—are you guys going to stay in Canada, or is your dad’s job a temporary thing?”

Caitlin smiled. “As long as he doesn’t accidentally push Professor Hawking down the staircase, he’s here for good. In fact, he’s already talking about taking out Canadian citizenship. He has to travel a lot to conferences and, well, there are some places it’s just not safe to go as an American.”

It was awkward facing each other in separate chairs, and—

And Matt probably weighed only 130 pounds, and she was only 110—and these chairs had had no trouble supporting Dr. Kuroda, and he surely had weighed a lot more than 240. She got up from her chair and gave it a push to send it rolling away, and she said, “Do you mind?” with her eyebrows raised.

Matt smiled. “Um, no, no, not at all.”

She sat in his lap, and he put his arms around her waist, and the chair’s hydraulics compressed a bit under their combined weight.

They kissed for a while, and she shifted her bottom a bit to get more comfortable, and—

And, well, well! Penises did do that!

Matt seemed a bit embarrassed. “Um, so, ah, is this the last time he’ll get to vote for president?”

“Who? My dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

Caitlin stroked Matt’s short blond hair. “No. He’ll become a dual citizen.”

“I thought the US didn’t allow that.”

“They didn’t used to, unless you were born with it—and that was hard to come by. But, well, they—we—bowed to international pressure, and do allow it now, in fact, have allowed it for decades.”

“Ah,” said Matt, but there was something about his voice.

“Yes?”

“No, nothing.”

Caitlin kissed him on the nose. “It’s fine,” she said. “Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s just, um, you know, you should be either a Canadian or an American.”

“Oh, I think dual citizenship is a wonderful thing. It’s… see, it’s anti-Dawkinsian.”

“Oh. Um, I know you’re from Texas, but, ah…”

She flicked her forefinger against his shoulder. “We’re not all rubes, Matt. Of course I believe in evolution. But—”

“Yes?”

Caitlin’s heart started pounding even harder than it had when Matt had first arrived. She suddenly felt the way she did when she saw something in math: something that was suddenly, obviously, gloriously true. She leaned back a little so she could look clearly into his blue eyes. “Evolution—natural selection—is only effective up to a point. The problem with evolution is everything Richard Dawkins talked about: selfish genes, kin selection. Favoring your closest genetic relatives initially lets you out-compete those who aren’t related to you, but then it actually becomes counterproductive once you become a technological civilization.”

“How so?”

“Look, take a bunch of… I dunno, a bunch of wolves, right? They’re all competing for the same resources, the same food. Well, if you and your close relatives outnumber them—if you squeeze the other wolves off the fertile land or keep them from getting access to prey, they die out, and you survive. That’s evolution: survival of the fittest, and it works so long as numerical superiority is all that counts. But as soon as you become a truly technological species, evolution doesn’t provide the right… um, what’s that word?”

“Paradigm?” suggested Matt.

She kissed him as his reward. “Exactly! The right paradigm! If there are a hundred of you and your close relatives and only one of the guy who you’ve been squeezing out, but he’s got a machine gun and you don’t, he wins; he just blows you all away.”

“Ah,” said Matt in a teasing tone. “You’re not packing heat now, are you?”

Caitlin thought about saying, “I’m not the one who’s packing,” but she couldn’t quite get the words out. So instead she said, “No. Us blind Americans tend to prefer hand grenades—they don’t require a precise aim.”

Matt tightened his arms around her waist. “Good to know.”

“But, in fact, that is the point: it doesn’t have to be guns. Any technology that allows you to take out large numbers of your competitors changes the whole evolutionary equation. And… ah! Yes! And that’s why sophisticated consciousness evolved, why it was selected for. Consciousness has survival value because it lets you override your genetic programming. Instead of mindlessly squeezing out those who aren’t like you—pushing them back to the point where they retaliate with their weapons—consciousness lets you decide not to squeeze them further. It lets us say to our genes, hey, give this guy who isn’t our close relative a chance, too—because that way he’s not going to feel a need to come after us while we’re sleeping. Making sure that only your own family is well-off is an advantage only when those who aren’t well-off can’t hurt you.”

Matt was slowly getting bolder. He brought his face close to hers and kissed her, then said: “That makes sense. I mean, it’s usually not happy people who lash out with terrorism or try to take their neighbor’s land.”

“Exactly! Those things are done by the desperate, or the forgotten, or—I don’t know—the envious. By eliminating poverty—by improving conditions half a world away—you do make yourself safer. Selfish genes could never come to that conclusion, but to a conscious mind it’s…” She paused, then allowed herself a grin. “…blindingly obvious.”

Matt kissed her again, then said, “I read a novel a couple of years ago that had this discussion of a scientist named Benjamin Libet. I thought the author was making it all up, but I googled it and it was true: Libet noticed that our bodies start to do things about a fifth of a second before our conscious minds become aware of the action. Get it? The body starts doing things first, unconsciously; consciousness doesn’t initiate the action, it just vetoes actions that it realizes are dangerous or inappropriate.”

“Really?” said Caitlin, leaning back again so she could see his face. “Wow, I didn’t know that.”

“But that would be proof of what you’re saying,” Matt said. “Consciousness’s role is to stop us doing things that we’d otherwise mindlessly do.”

“That’s cool. And I really do think that’s what’s happening. Dr. Kuroda told me that Japan is governed by something called the Pacifist Constitution, did you know that?”

Matt shook his head. “No.”

She snuggled in closer to him now, and he began gently stroking her back between her shoulders.

“There’s a huge difference in Japan before and after World War II,” she said. “Before, they thought they could take over the world; after, they simply gave that up—or, perhaps more precisely, they started vetoing what their selfish genes wanted them to do. They said ‘no more, never again’: better to live and let live than push the rest of the world so hard that the world decides to wipe you out.”

Matt nodded. “I guess you can’t have a couple of nukes dropped on you without thinking, hey, maybe I should stop pissing everybody off.”

“Exactly!” said Caitlin. “And look at the European Union: these countries that had been fighting wars with each other for, like, ever, suddenly also decided, ‘No more, never again.’ They just stopped letting their genetic programming drive them. They decided—these whole countries: Spain and France and Germany and Italy and England and Belgium, and all the rest—they decided that there was more survival value in ignoring kin selection, in getting along with everyone, than there was in letting their selfish genes control their actions.”

“Hmm,” said Matt. His hand was now higher up, stroking the bare skin on the back of her neck. “I think we’ve got some of that here in Canada. Remember the Tim Hortons sign? And the Wendy’s sign with the maple leaf instead of an apostrophe? The French and the English in this country are always going to be—well, the phrase is ‘two solitudes,’ after a famous Canadian novel on that theme.”

Caitlin smiled. The notion of a famous Canadian novel struck her as a bit of an oxymoron. But she let Matt go on. “Rather than pushing them, and fighting them, we—English Canada—said, okay, what will make you happy? And we did it. What’s a few apostrophes here and there? No skin off our noses.”

She lifted her head. “I thought they were going to leave.”

“Who? Quebec?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Leave and go where? You can’t move Quebec, you know. Separatism is dead—it’s like being a Leafs fan: it’s something you do for fun, not because you think you’re ever going to win.” He smiled. “I guess maybe we in Canada have grown up, too.”

Caitlin kissed him again. “The whole world is growing up.”

“But why now?” asked Matt, when their lips separated. “We’ve been conscious for tens of thousands of years, right? Why now?

“Did you ever read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?”

“You’re making that title up,” Matt said, smiling.

“I’m not. Bashira’s dad—Dr. Hameed—suggested I read it, and it was awesome. But, anyway, its author, Julian Jaynes, says we weren’t really conscious until three thousand years ago, when our left and right hemispheres started thinking as one. So, maybe we’ve just finally reached the stage where we can do this.”

She shifted again in his lap, and went on. “Or maybe it’s just that it’s really only in the past century—or less!—that random individuals have been able to hurt or kill large numbers of us, so it’s only now that it makes sense to not want to piss them off. After all, we’re talking about a conscious decision to cooperate instead of compete. And, hey, it’s interesting that we have that phrase, isn’t it? ‘Conscious decision’—as if we innately knew that most decisions aren’t.”

“You are a genius,” Matt said, smiling.

“Is that a line?” she asked.

“No,” he murmured. “A line is the path traced by a moving point.” She laughed and kissed him again, their tongues intertwining. When they at last pulled apart, she said, “Anyway, to get back to where we started, dual citizenship is a wonderful thing—the more places you think of as home, the better. I mean, what I’d give for an EU passport! To be able to live and work anywhere over there: to study at Oxford, or the Sorbonne, to work at CERN.”

“Yeah,” said Matt, stroking her back again. “That’d be cool.”

Caitlin nodded. “And you must have seen that this time, the president is making a big deal of wearing an American-flag lapel pin on the campaign trail, right? ’Cause he got shit upon four years ago for not doing that.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

“I know he’s running for re-election as president of the United States,” she said, “but that means being de facto leader of the free world, right? Who knows? Maybe in another four years, we’ll have an American candidate wearing a United Nations flag on his lapel. Wouldn’t that be cool!”

She was on a roll, and it felt good. “And how ’bout this? How about at birth everyone gets dual citizenship—the country they’re born in, and another country, selected at random? It would totally diffuse—and defuse!—questions of local loyalty. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Matt’s tone was soft. “Well, um, I…”

“You think it all sounds a bit naïve, don’t you?” Caitlin said, leaning back once more to get a good look at him. “Like I’m seeing the world through a rose-colored post-retinal implant?”

Matt laughed, and so did she.

And he brought his face close to hers, and she put her hands behind his head, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.