It happened in a sprawling laboratory in southern Italy. It happened in a dingy vet’s office next to a Domino’s.
Oliver slept in the front seat, curled up in his fuzzy blanket like a black silken handkerchief tucked in a pocket. We were driving into a city we’d visited many times—but today it was new, it was changing, it was reinvented right before our eyes.
Sun-shy men in business suits wandered from their high-rise to celebrate with tourists beneath a yellow awning. The pulsing glow of a woebegone electronics store drew in a crowd; on seventy-five inches of HD quality, kindly scientists explained the future. A war had ended, one said. A war people didn’t even know we were fighting. Someone hauled a massive speaker into Grand Park and cranked Bruce Springsteen until the sound frothed.
Oliver had walked that patchy park, sniffed its graffitied fences and urinated in its scrub brush planter boxes. It wasn’t one of his favorites. Pretty low on the list, actually—a dirty city park with glass scattered on the sidewalk and tumbleweeds of trash accumulated in its nooks. He got off the leash there once, grinning and sprinting. A snobby city lady screamed at me: My dog could bite someone. He could get into the street. Did I want him to die?
In the vet’s office, a highschooler there to trim her Chow Chow’s nails explained humanity’s new opportunity to an older gentleman petting a hairless cat. The receptionist must not have known the purpose of my visit. After taking my name, she pushed back fashionable red glasses and asked me if I’d heard the good news.
I discovered Oliver at a free-adoption event outside a budget supermarket. He was a mottled black and white Chihuahua mix, twelve pounds of nervous love and muscle. While the other dogs pranced and pleaded for attention, Oliver sat stoic. He watched me. I didn’t even consider the other dogs. Two roommates and a girlfriend have come and gone—Oliver’s stayed.
A portly Italian scientist discovered economically viable nuclear fusion by combining light atomic nuclei in a new and innovative manner. The process only required fifty percent of the heat and pressure thought possible, resulting in a flash of the sun right here on earth, a cataclysmic burst of energy, a glimpse of a future where scarcity was banished.
A week later, when the stock market had doubled and the world had not yet returned to its usual axis, my mom said I should have perspective. She pointed out that I did not cry this much when my grandmother died. There is a big picture, she said, and implied that I was a small picture person. All dogs die, that was a fact. But humanity did not have to.
Oliver was curled up in his fuzzy blanket. I brought it with us for the smell, to make the sterile examination room seem more like home. He looked asleep, but he was unconscious, and I wondered if there was a difference.
I tried to think of something else, of a future that was actually, truly bright. But I thought of Grand Park, its block-long rows of succulents and brush. I thought I should have stopped there and let Oliver off the leash.
I asked the vet how often he had to do this—I guess some part of the science mania had already rubbed off on me, the need to know and sort the facts. I guess I wanted to do anything but cry.
Oh, he said thoughtfully, with the same kind face of the Italian scientist who changed the world. Once or twice a day.
You do this every day? I asked, completely staggered, reduced to nothing.
~
N. J. Webster has published stories in The Offing, Dishsoap Quarterly, JAKE, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He’s currently writing novels which will never see the light of day and procrastinating on Twitter (@realnjwebster).