X. THE FUTURE VIEWER

X. THE FUTURE VIEWER

A week passed without a letter from the Department. N. began to miss it. This frightened him more than the letters themselves. Bureaucracy had given shape to the anxiety; without the office, the fear became atmospheric again. Then an envelope appeared on his desk at work. FINAL INQUIRY: FUTURE OBSERVER. Inside was a photograph of N. taken that morning as he entered the building. Beneath it was a question: WHEN THIS IMAGE BECOMES OLD, WHAT SHOULD THE VIEWER BELIEVE HAPPENED TO YOU? There were three boxes: LIVED. DIED. UNKNOWN. N. stared at them until the words detached from meaning. He checked none.

He returned to the Department. The third floor was empty. The clerk’s desk remained, but dust covered it. The queue was gone. The doors stood open onto vacant rooms. On the desk lay a voice recorder. N. pressed Play. The clerk’s voice said, “If you are hearing this, the Department has ceased to be necessary.” N. looked around angrily. “Necessary to whom?” The recording continued: “You believed the problem was uncertainty about other people. It was uncertainty about your own disappearance.” N. stopped the device. He hated explanations that arrived after the mystery. They made suffering look educational. He pressed Play again. “You asked where they were because you wanted someone, someday, to ask where you were.” The recorder clicked off.

N. sat alone in the abandoned office. The sentence was unbearable because it was partly true. To wonder about a stranger in an old recording was to grant that stranger a tiny afterlife of attention. N. had been scattering such afterlives in the hope that the universe might return the favor. He imagined a person in 2060 finding a forgotten clip of him crossing a street. The viewer pauses. Enlarges the image. Wonders: Who was that man? Where could he be now? The fantasy comforted him for less than a second. Then he saw its vanity. Being wondered about was not survival. Being remembered was not continuance. Attention could not negotiate with death. Still, he could not dismiss the tenderness hidden inside the question. Perhaps asking where someone went was one of the smallest ways human beings protested against disappearance.

At home, N. placed his phone on a shelf and began recording himself. He sat in a chair facing the camera. “To whoever watches this when it is old,” he began. He stopped. The sentence sounded theatrical. He tried again. “You may be wondering what happened to me.” He stopped again. What could he possibly say that would remain true? I am alive? Temporary. I am happy? Unreliable. I am myself? Philosophically disputed. Finally he said, “I do not know where I will be when you see this. But at this moment I am here.” He looked at the small red recording symbol. “Do not mistake your curiosity for my resurrection.” Then, after a pause: “But thank you for asking.” He reached forward and turned the camera off.