The Infinite Future by Tim Wirkus

Author:Tim Wirkus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

XVII

I didn’t read The Infinite Future myself until several months later.

It was a smoggy February day in Salt Lake during one of those freezing late-winter stretches where all the snow on the ground is dirty and hard, when all the cars are coated with salt grime, when all the smog gets trapped inside the valley, turning the air toxic and gray. It was one of those days when the city looks like the dystopian pictures of the Soviet Union I remember seeing in The Weekly Reader back when I was in elementary school. An ugly day, in other words, although I didn’t see much of it, because the sun hadn’t come up yet when I got to work, and it had been down already for hours by the time I left.

When I got home to my apartment—an old but charming place at the edge of downtown Salt Lake—I saw I had an email from Sérgio. We hadn’t been in contact at all since he’d found Salgado-MacKenzie, or the Cooper siblings, or whatever you want to call the author of all those stories. Sérgio had flown home out of Salt Lake the next day, and Harriet had dropped me off in Provo on her way back to Danesville. We’d all parted ways on friendly enough terms, but with no promises—at least on my part—to keep in touch, or get together again sometime.

Sérgio’s email was brief and to the point. He told me he’d been having trouble finding a publisher for The Infinite Future in Brazil and wondered if I’d be interested in translating the manuscript into English and shopping it around stateside. The Cooper siblings had given their permission. He hoped his email found me well and that he’d hear back from me soon.

That afternoon in Fremont Creek, we’d photocopied the manuscript right away—a copy for me, a copy for Harriet, and a backup copy for Sérgio. I’d slipped my copy, still warm from the old Xerox machine’s clanking innards, into an oversized manila envelope, which had remained unopened during my trip back to Provo and throughout my last few weeks in the storage room beneath the doughnut shop, my move to the apartment in Salt Lake, and my first months of employment as a filing clerk at Craig D. Ahlgren’s law firm.

That same envelope, still unopened, currently sat on a dusty shelf above my washer and dryer, and every time I did a load of laundry, that manila revenant would dredge up feelings of guilt and embarrassment as I remembered the pathetic, flailing version of myself that had first met Sérgio, the version of myself I’d gratefully left behind when I’d been rescued by Craig D. Ahlgren. That was the version of myself that would have cared about the envelope’s contents, but I wasn’t that person anymore.

Still, though, Sérgio had been kind to me, had shared with me the thing he valued most in the world: the writings of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. At the very least, I told myself as I

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