he hairy ape stabbed the meatball with a fork then shoved it into his mouth.

I could tell he had won a bundle of money on the fight. He enjoyed the practice of celebrating every winning bet with a subsequent orgy of food.

His holstered pistol was strapped over the living room couch. The sound of the city traffic ten stories below leaked through the apartment window.

My sister had insisted I make more of an effort to be nice to him.

“Carmine,” I told him, straining to stoke up a conversation. “I drove over to Flushing Meadows yesterday and spent the afternoon at the World’s Fair.”

My brother-in-law looked up from the newspaper clutched in his left hand. He stared at me from across the dining room table. “And…?”

I leaned back in the chair. “It was an enlightening experience, to say the least.”

“Fuck the World’s Fair,” he said, pausing a moment to swallow the meatball. “Did you hear about last night’s fight? Louis pounded the guy into a pulp. The radio said there was blood everywhere.”

I appreciated a good boxing match as much as the next person, but I wished to convey the special nature of this event. “Carmine, I saw the future at the World’s Fair. I toured all these exhibits displaying modern devices. Now I know what the future has in store for us. And I for one am very optimistic.”

He pointed the fork at me. “The future? What’s the future got that we don’t got right now? I won a grand on Louis last night. Who needs the fucking future?”

“I saw the robot called Elektro inside the Westinghouse exhibition hall.

He frowned. “What’s a fucking robot?”

“It was a machine-like figure that stood about ten feet high, and had these metal knobs or hooks for hands. The thing could actually walk and talk.”

The lamplight glared off his protruding forehead. “Ten feet tall? With knobs and hooks?” A pause. “Sounds like a cross between a beast and a freak.”

“Right,” I told him. “That would make him a Feast.”

He refused to smile. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, carefully wrapping the pasta around his fork. “Guys like you can’t wait for the day when guys like me won’t be needed. You want to believe some machine will do all the dirty work. You’re hoping some smart guy will make a neat collection of moving parts capable of making the peace. You imagine scraps of shiny metal operating with no emotion, no excess.”

While still holding the newspaper in one hand he pounded the table with his other huge fist. “Lets face it. You dream of making my kind obsolete.”

I suddenly caught the headline plastered on the front page of his newspaper. I leaned forward, plopping the front legs of the chair back on the floor, and waved at the article with my finger. “Carmine. Look! It’s getting worse for the people of Po-…”.

He interrupted. “I know what you are. They got a name for you robot-loving people. They call you guys Utopians.”

I was astonished that he had actually mouthed such a fancy word. For a moment I thought my sister’s framed picture of FDR, mounted on the wall next to the icebox, had performed some magical form of ventriloquism.

He continued. “Sorry to disappoint you, college boy, but I see trouble up ahead. The future looks dark and ugly. If you ask me, Utopians are setting themselves up for nothing but disappointment.” He licked his lips. “The world still needs guys like me to settle things. And I guarantee you one thing. We’ll have plenty of business in the years to come.”

The newspaper headline continued to draw my attention, but I persisted on the subject of the World’s Fair, hoping to counter his gloomy prognosis “Carmine, there was this thing called a television at the RCA pavilion. You wouldn’t believe what this contraption can do.”

He scooped up the pasta and shoved it into his mouth, then turned away to stare out the window, at the silhouette of the Empire State building, rising like a totem from some other age.