Chapter 9

1

“We didn’t put it to a vote. He was under direct surveillance and we’d determine the outcome based on credible feedback.”

            “And then what? We’d monitor him for another month and drag out the process for the sake of being democratic?”

            “I didn’t agree to do this if decisions were made off the record…unilaterally.” Trevor Kramer was stirred up. His face was flushed, his fists clenched.

            “I made the call based on circumstance. And you weren’t around yesterday anyway. Even if I had decided to summon an inquisition based on evidence, you and your wife weren’t even in Reedy Creek.”

            Norris Serkis had remained calm. The council meeting was arranged the moment Trevor read the inquest faxed to him. He’d called Paul, and Paul set up the hearing at the school first thing Monday morning, just as janitorial services were going through the last of summer detail to get the place up and running in a week.

            “He’s right,” Andy Napolitano said. He wasn’t in uniform; the man preferred to wear khakis and a polo to these meetings, if only to remove himself from what he considered the institutionalized shackles of law enforcement. “We have feeds of your car leaving the Creek yesterday morning at around 10. Northward.”

            “So you’re excusing his decision based on my absence?”

            Andy only shrugged.

            “We’re here to argue the merits of my decision over democratically ignoring an opportunity I discovered.”

            Andy looked at Norris across the table. Sunlight was wafting in through the closed venetians, but the room remained dim. It was Hector’s office. Principal Perez. He sat at his oak desk, covered in organized sheafs of paper, inbox files, and a personal computer afforded the Creek school district by corn money. The office was large, with a couch and a meeting table Perez often stacked with teachers for morning class overviews. Trevor Kramer’s book sat on the corner, its spine facing Norris; it was joined by others. Thomas Malthus. Paul Ehrlich. Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring. A copy of Limits to Growth, a compendium funded by the Volkswagen Foundation based on computer models that had stated, and helped to determine Kramer’s own research, that economic growth could not remain sustainable considering the limited resources of a closed system, or what Trevor consistently called Spaceship Earth in his bestseller.

            “Enlighten us,” Trevor said.

            “Clayton called me. Yesterday morning. He was belligerent. Not directly to me. He was looking at me as a recourse only. Baiting me to sympathize. I prescribed him Nembutal based on his medical history, but the findings were anecdotal. He had some form of neuralgia. His feedback on the barbiturate was a steady calm. If he wasn’t hopped up, he puked. So he went to fill an empty prescription and the pharmacist told him no. I don’t mean to incite dispositive assumptions, but consider if this behavior persisted a few months from now. What if he’d abused his prescription to the point where he believed his focus was primarily at the end of a needle? He’s a loose screw, Trevor. He went waving around his illness to those who’d listen and called me for the therapy because he understood his inhibitions were gone. Maybe he’d take a knife to the pharmacy next time. Wave it around. Hold it against the assistant’s throat.”

            “That’s a sensational assumption, Norris.”

            “That’s a reality. Watch the news sometime.”

            “You’re extrapolating now,” Andy added, and the big principal behind the desk, overweight and balding, nodded his head in agreement.

            “Andy’s right,” Perez said.

            “Then why are we here? Why are we in Reedy Creek if not to combat eventualities? A result cannot always be inferred, but intentions and motive can. Clayton had me meet him at his home. He smelled of vomit. I made a decision based on circumstance. The evidence will point to an over dose. When the call comes in. I guarantee that. I’ve left no trace that I’d been there. I was not on video. His cameras were in the bathroom and bedroom. I left him on the La-Z-Boy in the front room, otherwise Watchtower would have already alerted Andy’s forces.”

            “You murdered him.”

            “And so a vote would have waived us of that charge? Where the fuck have you been?” Norris was standing. He was slim and unassuming. But he was threatening the way a lithe cat could be imposing when it bared its fangs. He was hunched over the table, his hands both balled into fists on its surface. His eyes bore a deep hole into Trevor’s. And so Kramer remained silent. Because there was no doubt that Norris Serkis was intimidating. “You voted yes when we decided Robert Wilson was a candidate. Yes to Colin Perkins. Yes to Veronica Hedges. Excuse me, but I’m just confused by the hypocrisy here.”

            “He’s right.”

            It was a new voice. The man had been listening intently, silent but regarding each term of the argument. His fingers were steepled, both elbows resting on the table, his seat at the head by the slatted window, wisps of salt and pepper dotting his short hair.

            “We’re in the business of making tough decisions. It’s why I invited each of you to this council. Not to inform opinion in townhall debates, but to consider long-term investment. That’s what this council is. You must understand that. A long-term investment. Otherwise why write that book, Trevor? Why devote so many years educating the self-righteous only to defer the tough decisions to nature…to God?”

            “Are you saying you authorized this?” Trevor asked.

            Paul Holdren pinched his upper lip for a moment, then slowly nodded. “Norris didn’t require my authorization.”

           “No? Then what’s the point of our council?”

           “We’re here, Trevor, to recognize certain inevitabilities. To re-define eventual. To look at Nature’s fuck yous with a certain tip of the cap. Norris found a proliferation of cells in Colin Perkins. Nature decided his fate before we ever could. But nature merely holds the gun. We decided to pull the trigger. Veronica Hedges had months to live. Months. Consider what would have been used up to make her comfortable, even as every part of her wished for death. You need to ask yourself that. All of you: were you to lose that exchange with nature, would you wish to look at your own philosophy now, to look at what you know about the world and what we have done, and continue to consume even as IVs are keeping you alive, or would you put the gun in your mouth because you understand, nay, you fucking know you are not here as a drain but a solution?”

            Trevor considered this for a moment, looked at Andy, then folded his arms. There was a lot said. A lot. And he remembered that first phone call. What would you say if I gave you an opportunity to make a difference? He understood there were certain travesties for which he would have to be held accountable. For the sins of his father, his grandfather, and his father before him. Because one held the roots of his ancestry like the string of a balloon, and the weight of the past would always bear on him. Always.

            “Are you suggesting we expand?” Hector asked.

            “Isn’t it expected of us to try?”

            “Then what are you suggesting?” Norris asked, obviously intrigued. He’d sat back down and crossed his legs.

            “I’m suggesting we work faster than nature. Than evolution.”

            “You’re talking in bromides,” Perez said. “We’re not here to sell T-shirts.” Andy chuckled.

            “No, we’re here to change the world. Think about what we have at our disposal. We have Watchtower. We have eyes in the sky. God underground. We have access. A goddamn window into Reedy Creek’s soul. For every Rosenberg there’s an adulterer, a kiddy diddler, a wife beater. All we have to do is ask to see what Grimwood’s seen. And he will show us the Creek’s shadows. You can’t perform surgery without knowing what’s interconnected. Nature works slow because the body tries to fight sickness. It tries. It requires so much for the slightest ounce of comfort, but we cannot rely on the random act of one misfortune among the many.”

            “I’m confused, Paul. What are you asking us to do?”

             Paul was looking at Trevor now. Directly at him. “What if you knew somebody’s sins? Knew every dark secret…”

            Trevor looked at his hands. He knew where this was going.

           “Would you have still made a deal with the men that threatened your son’s life? Your wife’s?”

2

The office is mostly oak. The bookshelves, the desk, the credenza by the leather recliner, all patterned by the whorlish grain of wood, stained dark, but the required companion of a financier. It is as if a banker learns in grad school the proper accoutrements of low and high yield parlance find requisite accommodation in domestic wood. Like the elbow patches required of tweed blazers for professors. The man sitting across from him is a stereotype, with the ol’ Mass drawl in his voice that elongates hard Rs. He is wearing round glasses, and he pinches his nose often. He has pictures on his desk. Two of his wife and three daughters. The others are photos hanging on the wall of him with Dewey Evans and Carlton Fisk and Freddy Lynn. Boston royalty.

            “You emptied your NOW savings. Rida didn’t want to say anything, but she was worried. She said you wanted to sell your mutual funds, even despite the interest we were compiling in a savings account for Adam’s college. I wasn’t going to conceal my disappointment, because you know my involvement in the matter, beyond our friendship, was my grandfather’s association with the inception of the ’24 Massachusetts Investors' Trust. Look, I know this isn’t between you and me. Something I might have done.”

            “It isn’t.”

            “Because you look different. Thin. Gaunt, though I hate to say it.”

            “I’m in trouble, Roger.” Trevor shifts his legs; it’s not a tic as much as it is discomfort. He is always uncomfortable, always shifting. His mind is always unfocused. First he looks at the pictures, then at Roger’s cherubic face behind those round spectacles that always remind him of some Dickensian protagonist. Roger is a friend from university; he wasn’t sure then if he could be friends with a banker, but beyond the idealism of one’s academic pursuits and ideological groundings, there are the pragmatic and realistic implications of one’s living and future. He could not escape that truth, just as his own Marxist advisor couldn’t escape the fortunate benefit of significant financial reward for a tenure position, with all the bells and whistles of federal and private grants for research into sociological criminality.

            “With whom?”

            “Myself. To be honest. The doom and gloom, it worked on paper. My book’s royalties were comfortable. Especially when it got into universities. But the publisher, they wanted constant fucking PR. You’re nothing if you’re not a presence.”

            “Right.”

            “I published in ’80. Or early ’81. At least the subsequent printings. When you write and see doom and gloom, they expect you to defend against certain realities. Ehrlich was the same. He made incredible predictions he knew he’d see in his lifetime; he wasn’t thinking long term regarding his brand, because that’s what you become, as a thinker…a brand. Said sea life would be extinct by 1980. And here we are. Still eating Maine lobster. Remember that bet Julian Simon and Ehrlich made? I wrote about it extensively because I was on Paul’s side. They made that bet about commodities prices…long term, the more people, the scarcer metals would become and prices would skyrocket. Ehrlich was certain of it. Simon was on the side of human ingenuity overcoming the Malthusian axiom. Sounded like bullshit to me. But here we are. The commodities index is trending downward even as folk fuck like jackrabbits—”

            “Ehrlich’s a kook. An opportunist.”

            “Aren’t we all?”

            Roger arches his brow and folds his arm. He sits back in his chair and it groans.

            “I mean, we make claims. We make claims for others we wouldn’t hold ourselves accountable for.”

            “This is about the debate.”

            “The fucking publisher wanted a media presence. They saw the press Ehrlich was getting. The New York Times still worshipped him, even when he was wrong. And he was always wrong. The publisher wanted to squeeze out every last goddamn drop they could from The Population Problem. I had a bestseller, Roger. I was living on the high of academic royalty. I was flashed checks and given access to something I’d protested, the sort of luxuries I’d protested, and Barb understood there was a life beyond the middle class we so fucking hated, and I wrote about the arithmetical failures of our resources as we over-consumed and over-populated like locusts, but I didn’t hold myself accountable to those standards—”

            “And you were roasted for it.”

            Trevor nods. “I couldn’t argue it. Not in front of the cameras. Not in front of that smug piece of shit, because he had me. He was my Julian Simon. And his gotcha statement had me. And he knew it. My publishers knew it. And the moment you’re on television with that sort of freeze, with that sort of pause, you’re finished.”

            “Jesus, Trevor. Why didn’t you tell me?”

            Trevor chuckles. It’s a false sound, something that wouldn’t appear authentic to a stranger. But it’s the only sound he can make. And he is gaunt. He’s lost more than twenty pounds, and he was never heavy to begin with. He was healthy. Healthy and well fed for a man claiming the ardors of starvation that are strangling the world. Now his ribs jut like the brow of some granite overhang in a quarry. “I haven’t told Barb. And it’s not even what Scott Woods said during the debate. It’s not even that fucking gotcha. Not even the silence after, when I knew bloody Wilson up at the moderator’s pew had me licked. No, it was standing in front of my students the next Monday…I could see it in their eyes. Every one of them. They didn’t trust me anymore. They didn’t. And it was just…it was over for me. I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t say a word. Because they’d judge everything that came out. They would question every possible thing I had to say. Because I was expecting of them the sort of…decorum to which I wasn’t abiding. My wife wasn’t abiding. I’m on hiatus. Unofficially. But a part of me, I think the university wants me gone. I’m an academic liability. A charlatan.”

            “Trevor, you and I both know that’s bullshit. One misstep—”

            “I know what you’re going to say, I do. I appreciate it. But it’s not necessary. Barb doesn’t know I’ve left the university. I wake up in the morning, leave, and come home at night.” He scratches his face; there is the comings of a beard now. It is nothing out of the ordinary, but for Trevor it is. For Trevor it is like the affirmation of his acceptance of all that has happened. That is still happening.

            “Are you gambling?”

            A shot in the dark, for sure, but Roger’s seen it often enough to know that guesswork is sometimes just deduction. But Trevor’s not. He’s not gambling the way Roger assumes, not betting it all on black or hoping for a 21. He was never the type. But he is gambling away something; his children’s future, for one, and not in the grand sense that would purport his and their existence was some blight on the face of the earth. To make up for your own hypocrisy, you did what you felt was right. You gave what you made, what you earned on information you wrote but didn’t live. And that was your undoing. That was your fault.

            Cash donations to Greenpeace. To the Sierra Club. To the Gaia Project. Anonymous donations. As penance or absolution, a tax on his own misgivings. He gives everything in transactions that act as confessionals for him, to make things right. For himself. In a way the action is selfish. Academics are usually narcissistic; there is nothing better in the world than seeing your picture on the back of a book.

            Trevor finally shakes his head. “No. No, not gambling. Not in the way you think. I made impulse decisions. Did what I thought was right.”

            “And was it?”

            “I’m a father, Roger. A husband. I am everything I ever fucking protested, and I never saw the irony in it. Never. I hated myself for that. Hate myself. Because I like what I am.”

            “Then why apologize?”

            “Because what I teach, what I believe and what I am, the two aren’t compatible. And I pissed everything away to make up for that.”

            “So you’re here to make that right?”

            He thinks of the thoughts he’d had since that debate. The thought of putting a gun in his mouth. Driving out to the woods, looking at those elms flaying a canopy above, those elms the New Yorkers drove to ol’ Mass to see when the leaves turn, and put the barrel in his mouth. But what would that do but give all the power to guys like Scott Woods, to economists, to the market?

            “I’m here for my family, Roger. Same thing you’d do, I suspect.”

            “Good. I’m your friend, Trev. We dropped acid together,” Roger chuckles. One cannot imagine the big man reducing himself to Leary’s party favors. “I was with you when you met Barb. It would be remiss of me not to offer you some benefits. Look, we’re at an advantage right now. Banking is fickle. You know that. I’m involved in a new thrift right now, and we’ve got mutual funds in some tech start-ups, local, following the west coast trend in Palo Alto. But we need capital. The principal investors own the real estate, and the interest accrued alone on that property could ensure Adam’s four years at Hah-vard are covered. And then some. Shit’s on the cuff, so to speak. I wasn’t aware you were in so much trouble or I would have pulled you in sooner.” Roger wipes his forehead. He is noticeably sweating; it is a tell, but he is also overweight. And corpulence is nothing but a sign of affluence; and overconsumption is the telltale sign of Takers and Exploitation. “I’m taking in what are called Jumbo deposits, or certificates of deposit, CDs in our parlance if you want to get idiomatic.” His fingers are clasping and unclasping. His knuckles are hairy. Trevor’s never truly noticed just how hairy until now. “The FDIC will insure you up to $100,000, and your present situation, your present net worth, it won’t set any red flags. I promise. And the short-term returns will be fantastic.”

            “This off the record?”

            “This is a friend helping a friend.”

            Trevor considers this. Roger was at his wedding in California. He was smaller then, had more hair. But he’s been a good friend. “I don’t have $100,000 to invest.”

            “I could take a $40,000 minimum. The max was changed from that set limit in ’78.”

            “Roger, I don’t have forty to give either.”

            “Look. This is an enormous opportunity. I know we’ve butt heads in the past. About the market. About the Soviets and Supply Siders. That’s under the bridge.”

            “Are you my loan officer now?”

            “I’m your adviser. Like I’ve always been.” Roger will soon have the same thoughts that had once travailed Trevor’s mind. But he will make good on the threat. He will taste the business end of a pistol. It would be his last gourmet meal. But the future doesn’t matter. Because money is now, now, now, you strike when the iron’s hot. And Roger is going to strike. Because he sees an opportunity for a friend, consequences be damned. Because consequences are in the future.

            He opens his drawer and takes out a piece of paper. He is the type of man with a feathered quill, but the ink is dry in the fountain. The pen is just for flourish anyway. He removes a Bic from the inside of his coat and writes down a number. He slides the paper toward Trevor.

            “Call this number. They’ll know I gave it to you, so they’ll know you were vetted. You use your book as a reference, the copy that says New York Times Bestseller right on the cover, the second edition I think—” Trevor nods, looking at the paper, “—and they’ll discount the interest. You’ll more than make up for it in the long term. I promise. The Feds have guarantees now. Garn—St. Germaine Depository Act, for one. Passed to make up for the fucking drudgery of Carter’s Admin, I’d say, but it gives these thrifts expanded lending and investment opportunities that allow testing riskier ventures cause the Bank Board has the authority now to merge failing S & Ls with commercial banks. We’ve got a moral hazard working to our advantage, Trev. Like I said, this is an opportunity.”

            “Who am I calling, Roger?”

            “It’s an opportunity. And this is for your family. It doesn’t matter who picks up the phone. What matters is making up for what you lost.”

            Trevor does call. And it is a mistake.

3

They were all silent. The pre-conditions that had resulted in their coming here, coming to the Creek, were the private results of idealists hoping to make a change. Trevor had been in the news. The big debate was in the news. Carson even made light of it in a bit with Bill Murray, playing the smarmy economist named Scott Woods, throwing out the argument-ending gotcha leaving ol’ Johnny speechless and on the verge of tears, only to lean toward Ed Macmahon and call him mommy. He’d been reduced to a blubbering child. He’d watched the segment. Not because it made him a household name to viewers outside of academia, but because it was a part of the process; it was a part of healing. But he’d listened to Roger, and he called the number handed to him, and the man on the other line wanted a meeting. And when he did meet, he was patted down. Looking for wires, they’d said, and though the private consult struck him as odd, he had his good friend’s optimism in his corner. And he was naïve enough to believe Roger. He was.

            And Roger put a gun in his mouth when shit went south. He put the barrel end on his tongue and pulled the trigger in the very office where you made the investment. He sprayed his pictures, oh those ever-so-coveted pictures of Dewey and Freddy and Carlton with his grey matter. You might have done the same, might have, if it didn’t mean those bastards would burn down your house with Barb and the kids in it.

            But Paul Holdren offered his own gotcha statement. Because those men, those lenders, they weren’t of the banker type offering liens or foreclosures. They were out for blood. The Low Breed, his father-in-law called them. If he had a chance to nip them in the bud, to nip that fucking problem in the bud, he would have done so in a second. Paul knew that. He understood the psychology of family, even if he did not have one himself. But to be in the position he was in, ol’ Paul had to understand humanity, had to understand the undergirding dynamics that masqueraded as free will, otherwise he would never have climbed out of those holes into which he’d dug himself when he was called a Jim Jones wannabe. “His fuckin’ Gaia Project would have ended with a thousand gullible pricks drinking arsenic to let up a little weight on Mother Earth’s face.” It was Andy’s comment, after he’d drunk a few too much. “Then why did you come?” Trevor had asked. Andy arched his brow then, just as he arched his brow now, looking at Paul sitting at the head of the table. “Because I agreed with him”

            They all agreed with Paul. That’s why they came to the Creek for this pilot project. For this experiment.

            “Look, if we’re going to succeed, if we’re going to make Reedy Creek an example, we need results to show for it. And I think I’ve found our ticket.” Paul cleared his throat. Trevor would always remark that the man was a presence. When he first started giving checks to Project Gaia, it was all he could think: this guy is going to make a difference. This guy is who you should have been.

            “A scientist with NASA, James Hansen, just spoke in front of the House of Representatives in June. The New York Times covered the groundwork to get the word out to the common denominator. Hansen’s noticed a causal relationship between observed present temperatures and our emissions. Greenhouse gases, he calls them. Apropos. He graphed a scalable scenario for presumptions based on present trends: what would happen with continued acceleration at an arithmetical level? What would happen with a constant and eventual rate of growth? What will the world look like in twenty years, thirty years, just because we were too damn slow in our efforts? Will the coasts flood? Are we looking at an Extinction Level Event because of hubris?” Paul rattled the table with his fists. “We’ve always looked at our progress, our intentions and technologies, our conveniences as a qualitative indication that we’re better than our forebears. Smarter. But we’re digging our own graves. All of us. And most cannot look beyond themselves to notice their hands are on the spade. And you may ask if we’re permitted to make a case for expanding our cause beyond the fringes? Look at what Yahweh did to the reviled in the Old Testament. To expunge the earth of its illnesses, He was expected to be vengeful. And what do you think Congress will do to combat our eventual doom? It will create red tape. Bureaucracies. A fucking Office of Global Warming to oversee what the EPA may overlook, and then they’ll tax emissions. I guarantee it will all come down to taxes, and the fucking Reaganites will call the measure socialist, and the hippies will say the government hasn’t done enough. Like molasses. A slow drip till there’s nothing left.

            “For the world to persist…for humanity to persist—” Paul looked at each of them in that room. Trevor didn’t like the fire in his eyes. He didn’t like how rational Paul appeared considering what he had to propose. But they were all interested, weren’t they? Or why had they come to this place, to this cornfield? “Because I agreed with him,” Andy had once said, a drunken slur that elongated his Es, and Trevor was certain he would have said the same now, stone sober. Because Paul had a way about him. Is the state financing this whole thing? Or is it corn money? Trevor didn’t know. He didn’t think any of them did. But perhaps that little mystery made what they were doing more enticing.

           “—we need to make choices above the law. We need to be above the rules.”

            A plan was proposed. A plan Norris Serkis quite liked. Only because Norris Serkis liked being the one there when Clayton Miller took his final breath. It hadn’t been his first murder, and it most certainly would not be his last.