The New Yorker- History Report by Simon Rich
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This is a recording of history report by Simon Rich from the September 5, 2022 edition of the New Yorker. Read by Marie Cara Betta I interviewed my great grandfather, Simon because he's the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America and Earth. He said he used to be a writer, I asked him if he wrote Spider Man and he said no, he wrote other things that have all been lost. My great grandfather was one of the only men to escape from earth. The rest of people who got seats on the escape pod were women and Children. My great grandfather says they let him on because they needed one man who wrote the spaceship, I'm not sure what he means because there are no doors on a spaceship, but that is what he said, My great grandfather told me how scary it was when earth became too hot to live on, the skies burned with fire day and night and you couldn't walk across the street without collapsing. I asked him if he had any kind of warning about climate change and he said yes, there have been articles, movies and books about how it was going to happen. I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening and he said yes, of course. I asked him how and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different colored boxes. I asked my mom and he was talking about and she explained that when people become as old as my great grandfather, their brains start to break down and it's almost like they turned back into babies since my great grandfather is going to die soon and he is one of the only survivors of earth. I decided to ask him what his favorite memory the planet was. I thought he might tell me about the end of World War Four or going to see Spider man, but instead he told me about the first date he went on with his wife, my great grandmother, Kathleen they met in college, which is a place people used to go after high school to drink alcohol. Some people drink so much there that they died. My great grandfather said that when he was in college online dating hadn't been invented yet, instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person before doing anything else. This meant that when my great grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked at this point. My mother who was recording our interview told my great grandfather that he was being inappropriate because this was a project for school and he apologized and said that the naked stuff was crucial to the story and that he was going to keep bringing it up whenever it was relevant. My great grandfather explained that not only had they not seen each other naked, he wasn't sure if my great grandmother wanted that to happen. Sometimes in those days when someone agreed to go on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face as if their actual living breathing face was their social media profile. Sometimes this would get embarrassing. Like you might ask, what do your parents do? And they would say my parents are dead and then you'd have to say something like I'm sorry, I didn't know that because I have no information about you, We are strangers and sometimes the other person would forgive you. But sometimes they would not. Also, sometimes the person you asked out on a date wouldn't even know it was a date because they had assumed that you were *** or they found you so unattractive that it had not even occurred to them that you might be pursuing them romantically. Like that notion was so sick to them that it had truly not even crossed their mind. And sometimes they would convey this information to you in the middle of dinner that they considered you a friend and nothing more and to make the situation less humiliating you would have to pretend that you felt the same way and keep on smiling all night. Even though you just learned that this person you hoped you might see naked was so repulsed by you. That even though you had invited them to a spanish restaurant, it had legitimately never entered their mind that you were hoping for intimacy because that would be as insane as being asked out by like a dog or a potato. The point my great grandfather said is that he had no idea what my great grandmother thought about him. He had no idea what she thought about anything. He had zero information about her other than what she looked like wearing clothes and also how it sounded when she laughed. But she had done a couple of times on their long, slow walk through campus but the cool fall breeze whipping through the scattered leaves. My great grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the tv shows they liked. If they both like the same show, they'd exchange memes from it. But here's the thing, gifts did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person, a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud. Do you remember the part when and then you perform the meme yourself using your face and body to imitate when an actor is undone. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text because when you text someone a meme and they don't respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn't have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme in person and the other person didn't like it, you would be able to tell because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say yeah, I remember that part and you just have to keep on walking to the restaurant, luckily though my great grandfather's mean performances went over well or at least well enough to keep the conversation going and while he still had no idea whether he and my great grandmother would ever see each other naked. He knew that it was at least still technically possible. My great grandfather had invited my great grandmother to a Spanish restaurant because it was the only restaurant he knew that served wine to people under 21. But when they arrived it was too crowded to get a table. They needed to find some other place to eat. But neither of them had Internet access. So their only option was to physically search for food by walking around and looking in random directions, like truly the same process used by animals. Things grew tense. The sun had set and my great grandfather was fearful they would not be able to find alcohol, but after a few stressful minutes they followed the scent of fried food around a corner and found a chinese place that served beer and they were so proud of themselves that they spontaneously high fived and that was the first time that they touched My great grandfather told me they stayed at the restaurant so long that by the end they were the only customers left because they were strangers. They asked each other pretty basic questions like who are you, where did you come from, what kind of person are you? They ended up having a lot of things in common, which was exciting because that doesn't usually happen on a date. Often the other person would dislike the things you like or love the things you hated or things would seem to be going pretty well and the person would seem really nice, but then out of the blue they would say, what is your relationship with, jesus christ? My great grandfather said that the main thing you talked to my great grandmother about was how nervous they both were about the future, I asked to be met climate change and he admitted that the imminent climate holocaust hadn't come up much. Instead, they mostly talked about their careers, It turned out that they both had the same dream to write stories down into pieces of paper. In fact they were both already trying to do that every day. They would each type out stories under computers and then print them with ink on two pieces of white paper. Their goal is to get better at making these paper stories in the hope that someday they might be able to persuade someone to reprint their paper stories into multiple pieces of paper and then sell those pieces of paper, four pieces of money which were also made of paper. At this point my mother whispered to me that it was time for my great grandfather to take a nap and she gave him some medicine which made him sleep for about four hours when he woke up though he was still insisting that all this paper stuff was real and that it was their actual shared ambition to write stories down onto paper and then sell the paper for more paper. And my mother smiled and rubbed his hand and said that she believed him. But while she was doing that, she buzz for the doctor and he brought this huge surrender. There was almost like a gun because it was made out of metal and it had a trigger on the bottom and the doctor explained that he was going to shoot this thing into my great grandfather's brain to make him less confused. And my great grandfather laughed weirdly and said that all he had been joking about all that paper stuff and that really what he and his wife had talked about on the first date was climate change because that's what any sane person from that era would have prioritized being a climate warrior and the doctor looked into my great grandfather's eyes at this finger on the trigger and said, are you sure? My great grandfather swallowed and said, yep. And so the doctor left, but on his way out he told my mom that he would stay nearby in case my great grandfather got confused again, in which case he would come back and give him that gun shot right to the middle of his brain. And my great grandfather was quiet for a while almost like he was afraid to keep going with the story. But when I pressed him for more information, he said, the main thing he wanted me to know before was not what he and my great grandmother talked about. It was how they talked because even though they were basically still strangers who had never even seen each other naked, they somehow believed in each other from the start. My great grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom after the two people have finished all the alcohol they've been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch arrested development, arrested development was a non spider man show that you played by putting small round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge the other's interest in becoming naked without having to directly ask them the way this works is a little complicated, but my great grandfather was able to explain all the steps first. You ask the other person if they had seen arrested development and they would respond some, but not all of it. This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes, they missed it. They didn't want to see you naked. They would say they had to finish a paper which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch arrested development, it meant that they probably wanted to see you naked. But here's where it gets complicated. Sometimes it didn't mean that sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch arrested development. That's why there was a third part of the custom after walking back to your dorm room and putting on one of the disks into the displaying machine. You would sit side by side on a small couch, your eyes would be facing the screen, but your attention would be focused entirely on each other. As arrested development played, you have physically moved closer to the other person, inch by inch without making any sudden movements. The idea was that if you both moved incrementally toward each other, eventually your hands would touch, if the other person pulled her hand away or laughed and said sorry, That meant they had really, truly come to watch arrested development. But if they did not pull their hand away from yours, that meant it was time to start kissing, Which is what my great grandparents did even though they had never exchanged even the most rudimentary of nudes. And at this point my mother told him to stop telling the story and he had to admit that the next part was genuinely inappropriate. My great grandfather said that their marriage wasn't perfect, sometimes they argued and in the 2050s they both had full fledged affairs with sex robots but they ultimately forgave each other because nobody's perfect. And also by the 2050 sex robots become extremely advanced and also incredibly persuasive. Like if you refused to have sex with them, they would start making really high level philosophical arguments about why it wasn't wrong using logic that was essentially bulletproof while their boobs and ***** lit up and spun and stuff. And eventually it got to the point where the U. N. Had to regulate the sex robot industry because they needed people to leave their apartments again so we could go back to being a society. The point is, my great grandparents rekindled the romance in the 2060s and they even ended up renewing their vows while riding on the escape pod to new earth in front of their daughters and their grandchildren. And my great grandfather asked my mom if she could remember the ceremony and she said she was only four at the time but she did vaguely remember how weird it was to see him on the spaceship when it was supposed to just be for women and Children. And my great grandfather said that they needed to bring one man to help the women lift their bags into the overhead compartments. And I reminded him that earlier he said he'd been on the ship to row an oar and there was a long pause and then he said that he was tired and he had to go to sleep and he closed his eyes but it didn't really look like he was sleeping because every few seconds he would open them to check if we were still there. And when he saw we were, he would quickly close his eyes again. And it was around this time that my great grandmother rolled up in a wheelchair and my great grandfather stopped pretending to be asleep and he sat up and smiled and she smiled back and then he looked into her eyes and said, do you want to watch arrested development. And my mom reminded my great grandfather that arrested development has been lost along with everything else on earth because of his generation's crimes against humanity. But my great grandfather ignored her in motion for his wife to well next to him and he flipped through random channels while her hands inched slowly towards each other. And that's when I finally figured out what earth was really like. It was kind of like arrested development. It was something people talked about and praised and maybe even tried to save. But the whole time, what everybody secretly actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. That's where all the mankind's efforts went. The sweat and toil of billions, not to saving the world, but to the frantic, desperate quest for love. That's why the earth is gone because it was nothing more than a conversation starter. It wasn't what we really, truly cared about. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other. And when my mom read my first draft of this, she said I shouldn't end it this way because it's glib and defeatist and deeply problematic and seems to absolve my great grandfather for his political inaction. It's not like anybody's gonna read this stupid essay and even if they do, it'll eventually be lost. Like everything else besides Spider Man. So I'm just gonna stop it right here because I want to go out the night's still young.