climbing slowly onto the bed, felt the weight of his small body on the mattress, sure that he was preparing to shock me into full wakefulness by jumping on the bed and shouting. But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that he leaned in gently toward me and kissed me on the back of the head, before climbing back down off the bed and creeping back out of the room and closing the door behind him.
It was, I said to my therapist, the sweetest and most tender thing I’d ever known him to do. I was so disarmed by it I felt that my heart might break with joy. What really got me, I said, was the realization that this was a thing I myself did: I’d come into his room at night to check he hadn’t kicked the covers off him in his sleep, hadn’t wet the bed, and I would do exactly what he had just done to me—I would kiss him on the top of the head, the back of the neck, and retreat quietly from the room. There was something so beautiful, I said, about the thought that he must have been conscious enough, even in his sleep, to internalize this gesture of protective love, and to return it to me in this way.
“Yes,” she said. “Because it is yourself you are seeing. And what you see is that you are doing well as a parent. You are seeing the love you are giving returned to you.”
This was exactly right, I said. And yet these feelings of joy and tenderness were always shadowed by the intimation of an unthinkable future, by the anxiety of what might be lying in wait for him and his little sister. I could try to distinguish between feeling and thinking, I said. I could say that the feeling was joy, and the thinking was the shadow that fell across it, but this seemed to me in the end like an artificial separation.
* * *
—
These apocalyptic anxieties of mine—the incessant reading of signs and portents, the perverse fantasies of disaster and collapse—were enfolded in a complex fabric of guilt and self-contempt. Because wasn’t the impulse to catastrophize, to imagine the collapse of one’s world, only the pursuit of a mind shaped by leisure and economic comfort? What did I really mean by the end of the world, after all, if not the loss of my own position within it? What was it that made me anxious, if not the precariousness of the privilege I had been born to, had passed on with doubtful hands to my own children? In the end, I understood that my fear of the collapse of civilization was really a fear of having to live, or having to die, like those unseen and mostly unconsidered people who sustained what we thought of as civilization. The people who grew the coffee beans for the flat white I bought as I strolled to my office. The factory workers in some gigantic Chinese city, whose name I would never need to know, who made the smartphone on which I listened to leftist political podcasts as I walked, drinking the flat white. The countless homeless people I passed as I walked, for whom civilization had already collapsed, and had perhaps always been so. The end of the world, I knew, was not some remote dystopian fantasy. It was all around. You just had to look.
* * *
—
There are times when I feel as though I am keeping a secret from my son. The reason I feel this way, I suppose, is that keeping a secret is exactly what I am doing. Just as I want him to continue believing in Santa Claus for as long as possible, I want to defer the knowledge that he has been born into a dying world. I want to ward it off like a malediction. I will tell him that he needs to curb his growing addiction to cleaning his ears out at night with cotton buds, because they can’t be reused and the plastic is “bad for nature.” I will tell him that, for the same reason, we need to be careful about buying too many toys. But I won’t tell him that the world is getting hotter all the time, or that the fish are all dying out, or that there may be no real point in planting that last Truffula seed, that the Barbaloots will not be coming back.
I