The River of No Return

clubs. She and the apple had jumped forward one hundred and fifty-five years. “Do you know,” she said to Nick, “I was so hungry that it didn’t even bother me. I stood by the side of the road, eating the apple and watching the cars go by, as calm as you please.” Now her ambition was to become fat before her year was out.
    Meg and Nick were told to study together during their free hours. Their task was to cram as much popular culture into their heads as possible. Books, movies, TV—anything published or filmed since 1960. Commandeering a comfortable room in the library, which was fitted out with a huge TV and big squishy chairs, they divided their mornings between watching, reading, and discussing. And eating. Meg always turned up with food.
    They had to start with picture books, since Meg didn’t know how to read. Nick surprised himself by how invested he became in her progress, and how much he came to like the peppery old woman as the days passed. He spent hours with her, poring over the brightly colored pages, until one afternoon the letters all aligned themselves and she hooted like an owl and the two of them danced around the room together, shouting, “‘Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am!’”
    Over the course of a few weeks Meg went from stammering her sentences out loud, her finger pressed to the page and pulling along under the words, to reading everything about Ireland that she could get her hands on. When he turned up one morning to find her tucked up in an easy chair reading a tome entitled Making Ireland British, 1580–1650, Nick tried to intervene. “We’re meant to concentrate on this thing they call contemporary pop culture,” he said. “I don’t think that’s it.”
    Meg looked up over the top of her book, her eyes bright beneath her white hair. “Do as you like,” she said. “I’m not in your road.” Down she dived again, her hand groping blindly for an enormous sandwich that sat just out of reach on the table beside her. Nick sighed and pushed the plate closer to her. It had been so companionable while she was learning to read: They had taken breaks from Dr. Seuss by watching their way through The Sopranos and The X-Files, with breaks from that for episodes of Father Ted and Leave It to Beaver . Now Meg was annoyed when Nick watched TV without a headset: “I can’t read with that noise in my ears!”
    The star student in every subject was a twenty-year-old Pocumtuk man named Leo Quonquont, who had arrived at the compound six weeks after Nick. The Guild assigned him to Bangalore, so he had to learn Finnish, English, and Kannada. By the end of his second month, Leo was cracking jokes in English. By the end of his sixth month, he outgrew the English class and joined Meg and Nick in their study group. They made an odd threesome. An English aristocrat, an American Indian genius, and an elderly, ravenous Irishwoman, all watching soccer on a Saturday afternoon, eating popcorn and hollering advice and recriminations at the screen. It shouldn’t have been possible. Yet they could joke together, argue together, and learn together: They were friends.
    * * *
    Nick discovered that he loved “future school,” just as the butcher had said he would. But nothing lasts forever. In retrospect, Nick believed that his friendship with Leo and Meg began to unravel the day he saw Leo talking to Mr. Mibbs.
    It was a beautiful late afternoon. Nick had just spent an hour with a coach, practicing modern American manners, slang, facial expressions, hand gestures. He was exhausted. Then he caught sight of Leo walking under one of the huge screens that were everywhere in the education quad, projecting a constant, silent stream of visual information about the present. Nick struck out across the grass, hoping to divert his friend into the bar for a beer. It wasn’t until he was several yards from Leo that he realized that the man walking near his friend—in front of him and a few feet to the left—was actually conversing with him. It was strange. They were not together, and yet they were.
    Nick slowed down, and Leo turned as if he had eyes in the back of his head. His face was still and serious. He shook his head once, with intent: Don’t come near.
    Nick nodded. It had been a soldierly communication, and all Nick’s battle senses were awakened. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out his phone, flipped it open, and tucked it against his ear. Then he changed the