Chapter 17
1
“You okay?” Andy handed Trevor his cup of joe. The sheriff pulled up to the house in his cruiser. He’d mentioned it had something to do with the official familiarity of the vehicle; when people saw a cop car, especially one branded with the Sheriff moniker, they were apt to ignore the proceedings in the hope that those in the cruiser would be ignoring them.
“You get along with Mary’s dad?” Trevor nodded a thanks and took his coffee.
“Luck was kind and cancer took him before I ever said I do. Her uncle walked her down the aisle, even though she protested the traditionalism of it all.”
That word. Cancer. It had teeth. And its reality was stealing Trevor’s sanity like a slowly draining basin. He and Barb were playing the waiting game now, and sometimes that sitting around in limbo was worse. Because the imagination was mean, and when it had an avenue down which to explore, it became a bully. But he was lucky. He had something to busy his mind beyond the worry, beyond the panic. He had the council, and if its success was measured by the secrecy of its intentions, his own success, the success of his marriage, was measured by the persistence of their privacy. The moment the council understood their waiting game, understood Barb’s insistence to sit in the kitchen and cry her tears while she waited for the phone to ring, they’d most likely see his hypocrisy for what it was, the same way Scott Woods, that goddamn economist, called him out for his own double standards during the debate that ended his fucking career.
Scott Woods.
“Why? You tousling with Barb’s ol’ man again?” Andy rubbed his mustache and cocked his eye at Trevor behind his aviators.
“It’s the dance, Andy. You and I both, we’re of the generation that wasn’t supposed to get along with their parents. With their girls’ parents. Those stodgy bourgeois rule makers. From the get go we butt heads. And maybe I expected that back then. I remember when I first met him; he tried to understand me, my youth, what I stood for, but I didn’t care to give him a chance because his institutions were beneath me. I wanted to transform them. And I knew it right when I came to Barb’s place. That first time. He had the flag on his porch, hanging from a pole under the awning. Like his neighbors. Left to right. Suburban paradise.”
“That’s what we were. What we are, Trevor. Catalysts.”
“But he got me out of a jam. He saved my life. Barb’s. My kids’. I don’t know what brought us all here beyond Holdren giving us the opportunity. But for me it was redemption. Nothing more, nothing less.” Trevor watched the houses out the window. Reedy Creek was sort of the same, wasn’t it? A little pocket of Americana. The experiment certainly worked on that assumption. “He likes to remind me about it. I don’t blame him. If I’m going to be candid, Andy, after I married Barb, she found out her mom was dying. She was a smoker. They both were. Lewis and Betty. Even their names screamed a sort Republican idealism. But I watched Betty die. I watched Barb mourn and inside, inside I was happy because I was offsetting something, I was offsetting my fatherhood. It was all about balance. And I think Lewis knew that. My book’s all about offsetting redundancies to combat scarcities. I laid it out in print and he read it and he’s carried a grudge. Because his idea of humanity, of being humane, it’s different than mine. Than ours.”
“That’s to be expected,” Andy said, just to kill the silence when Trevor took a deep sip of his coffee. “Because his idea is easier. Self-righteousness is easy. We’re making difficult decisions. He could never understand that.”
Trevor nodded. “He’s busying himself here doing something of a chronicle of the family. What else do old people do when the world’s already used them up?”
“What do you mean by chronicle?”
“I don’t know. Something like a scrapbook. A photo album. Who knows? His values are old. Traditions mean something to him; I respect that because he’s got his convictions. You can only respect principles because it means somebody’s thinking. It means maybe logic, an argument, can change their mind. This morning he came to me. He stunk of glue. That shit kids use in school. He asked me if I had the recording of my debate with Scott Woods.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew it would irk me. Because he knew that was when I was broken, and he wanted to remind me. If he’s chronicling the family, what could he use to prove my failure as a father, a husband…a man.”
“You’re braver than I am. Mary and I both agreed we weren’t bringing kids into the world until we made a difference. And maybe that was the difference.”
“I don’t regret it.”
“Regret what?” Andy asked, staring forward. They had a stop to make before the council meeting.
“When we watched Betty dying, when we watched her transition from what she was, from what I secretly prayed Barb would become if the years were kind, into this sad crone, this old lady whose exhaustion was like a coffin, Barb got pregnant. We always agreed we’d take care of things if they ever got real. I introduced Barb to Margaret Sanger, and she respected the implications inherent to taking control and making the choice for yourself, of looking at God and determining which life did and did not get to proceed without His say in the matter. But then, while Betty was dying, Barb got sentimental. Grief can be a burden on activism, and maybe then her principles were malleable, because emotion got the better of her. They did. She wanted to offset the coming loss of her mother with a child.”
“Jesus. You cannot argue that.”
“No, because sometimes emotion is stronger than logic. Smarter, even. But her reasoning was sound enough for me to make it work in the context of selling my fatherhood in combination with my thesis. Lewis understood that. But when Adam was born, when I first heard him cry, those scholarly applications, my own doubts, my own version of humanity, it changed. Fatherhood can express those sort of principles. That’s why we had Patrick. Even without a death in the family to offset our production.”
“You don’t have to sell me on anything,” Andy said, turning to him as they took Main Street. There were few people on the sidewalks. It was early enough on Sunday morning to assume most people were battling hangovers from the barbecue; the Creek would probably remain pretty quiet until around lunch, and by then Trevor assumed a decision would have already been made about how to proceed with what he was calling Stage Two of the experiment.
“Maybe I’m selling myself. Either way, Lewis knows how to strike me down. And I question things every day when I hear his voice in my home. If I lapped the present with the past, my youth, if I folded time, I wonder what I would think of myself back then if I knew what it would amount to? I wonder if I would have made all of the same choices.”
“Ruminate all you want. We’re making our own chronicle here in Reedy Creek, Trevor. In the end that’ll make all of the difference. Because your thesis may apply some moral grounding to everything, even if you don’t see it yet. Offsetting the birth of one who may deserve life by taking the life of another who squandered his opportunity. Tit for tat.” He pulled up to the curb and parked. “You’re not here for any personal redemption. You’re here for a revolution. The world’s changing. The world is fighting back against us now and we know which side we’re on. Your secrets are your own. The council respects that.”
“Do you?”
“I respect you as a friend. And I respect your work. What choices you may have made that brought Holdren in your life had to be the right ones or you might not be here today. Maybe your father-in-law came in tow because he’s a part of the cause just as much as you are. We can only wait and see what we find out today.” He killed the engine and opened his door. “You coming?”
Trevor sat in shotgun for a moment. Thinking. The Cause used to be such a poignant thing, an ideal, but the realer it became the more he questioned his own convictions. That didn’t so much scare him; what scared him was the reality of his own logic, that he’d become a part of a machine that would look at his wife’s cancer as the probable and definitive decision made about her life that would somehow offset or balance the choice made to bring in another, as if both decisions weren’t mutually exclusive. Until today that had been the golden rule. That was the point of Reedy Creek at its fundamental level. Zero net gain. He unclasped his seat belt and got out of the car, unsure what would happen today. Unsure what would happen tomorrow. And that scared him. Because until now he’d felt a certain level of control.
“The Diner?”
Andy nodded. “It’s where Grimwood wanted to meet us with the tapes.”
2
“Gentlemen. So nice of you to meet me so early in the morning. And a Sunday, no doubt, but I assume men of your caliber don’t often bend on knee to prostrate to an invisible deity. Reminds me of a saying of which I am rather fond. I think it’s Chesterton: When people don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.”
The man named Grimwood was sitting alone in the middle of the diner. There was nobody else in the restaurant with him, and the cashier behind the counter stood with an awkward lilt staring out at them, almost slack jawed. It’s almost as if she was struck dumb. Or scared. The latter made more sense to Trevor. Grimwood, tall and lanky, had a certain quality that was as intimidating as it was unnatural. Maybe it was his eyes, their nearly obvious cunning calculation as they flitted from one thing to another, or his maddening grin, always there, always leering, always so toothy. He reminded Trevor of somebody. Somebody he once had nightmares about, as kids were wont to do; he would learn in time it was one way for children to face fear: by turning what scared them into something they could, over time, learn to control with their imaginations. But that would take time. It did for Trevor. When he was in grade school, the janitor was a man with very similar features, down to that expressive grin; the kids would often say he was retarded, and the state had given him simple duties at Ivy Raurus Prep as a rehabilitative measure for ex-cons. The rumor was, the man had murdered his younger brother. Drowned him. As stories went, the details were pretty gruesome for Trevor, and even though he tried to rationalize certain untruths about why the state would feasibly consider having an ex-con clean up after kids under the supervisory conditions of an older teaching staff, he could not quite shake that awful grin whenever he saw the man. Whenever he saw ol’ Mr Spigget. He wondered if that was the same smile the janitor’s brother would watch as he died, as the tall man’s long fingers pressed down on his face to keep him submerged and he gulped and gulped and gulped until he was gone, just a bloated corpse that would wash up on shore. “Hiya, Mr Trevor,” he’d say, because it was apparently his talent to remember every name of the students at Ivy Raurus. Every one. And though he figured it was a sign of respect, a mock credo as to what Trevor would come to expect when he grew up and people offered him formal salutations, he never quite liked it, because he thought if he was somehow above this man, if this man could be jealous of him enough to prompt from him the sort of respect reserved for the teaching staff, he figured the man’s envy could foment into something dangerous. And he would dream. He would dream about Mr Spigget, mop in hand, standing in his closet, waiting for Trevor’s parents to go to sleep, waiting for the lights in the house to go out one by one, and he would slowly push open the bi-fold doors and appear out of the gloom of hanging shirts and the rack of folded jeans and pleated khakis, and he would step toward Trevor’s bed as the boy silently watched, frozen, unable to scream, and he would say: “Hiya, Mr Trevor.” And then he would muffle Trevor’s face with the mop, pressing the dirty rag against his lips so he could taste the scummy water, so he could taste Owen Harrison’s vomit after having eaten the fish and taters and feeling his stomach turn during Geometry. “What’s got your tongue, Mr Trevor?” And then Mr Spigget would drag him from his bed to a tub that was already full of viscous mop water, the white basin rimmed by clotted dusts and insects that had died in this room over the years, and he would throw Trevor inside and hold his head under water, hold it while he gulped at the thick goop and felt everything give until he woke up. Screaming.
“Are you hungry? You’re not Creekers, so you undoubtedly are unaware of the amazing bacon here. Thick. Cooked to perfection. I can have the cook make up a new batch. Fresh stuff.” He had a plate in front of him. Eggs with yolks so richly and deeply orange one could mistake the mounds for sunsets, paired nicely with marbled rye toast and a few slabs of the fat bacon he’d just mentioned. It could have been 3/8” thick, the grease running in nice rivulets onto the plate where the toast was soaking like a janitor’s rag in ammonia.
“I’m fine. Trevor?”
Trevor only shook his head. He hadn’t seen Grimwood since he grabbed the tape of Wilson’s car accident. And that was only a quick exchange: meet at the door, nod of the head, and off he went. He didn’t want to spend any more time than he had to. He wasn’t sure where Paul Holdren or the outfit financing this endeavor, whether it was private or federal, found Grimwood for his security services, but the man’s means of traveling seemingly undetected throughout the Creek had him convinced he was a former spook. The guy goes on and on about the Cold War, about the state Lysenkoism that would put a bullet in your head if you veered off the party line. Maybe he was in the shadows there, some NATO hound dog with several passports in different names.
“Please. At least sit down and join me.” He forked a combination of bacon and egg whites into his mouth and chewed slowly, looking back and forth between the two. Andy sat first, pulling back a chair and hitching his belt. His gun clicked against the chair’s leg as it dangled. Trevor followed. The cashier still watched with an unyielding fascination. He wasn’t sure if the girl had even moved since they walked in. Maybe she’s still nursing a hell of a hangover. The beer flowed freely last night. He wasn’t sure that was right. The girl just seemed curious and afraid. He couldn’t hear the cook in the back, couldn’t hear the rattling of pots and pans, the sizzle of bacon fat on the fryer; the place was quiet and eerily peaceful. Not like any diner he’d ever been in. “Mr Holdren remains a name on a check. Does he call you both his errand boys?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean?” Andy said, shifting in his seat. He appeared uncomfortable. For a man with a gun to show such visible weakness defined in and of itself the very clarity of Grimwood’s power.
“You’re the sheriff of this fine little town. And you, a writer, are you not? Published and acclaimed in those hallowed halls of pedigreed graduates. The enlightened. And yet here you sit with me, watching me eat, to pick up a package Mr Holdren ordered. Usually when one sends others to accomplish a menial task, one may assume those performing the act are nothing more than errand boys.”
Andy gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. It was a back-ended insult of the sorts, something one might say out of spite but with the passive aggressive intonation to remain at least sophisticated during the exchange. “Doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do for Paul Holdren. What matters is what we’ve come to get.”
“Ah yes. The tapes. Mr Holdren’s curiosity about this town has me and my men monitoring a 24/7 cycle of the feeds. Digital multiplexing, we call it. Here and there. Everywhere. Reedy Creek has its secrets. Its good guys and bad. You are particularly fond of the bad, aren’t you?” He grinned again, that oh-so-toothy leer that pinched up his eyes beneath the shadowed brim of his fedora. He took a bite of his toast after stabbing its crusted edge into the yolk, leaving it to bleed in freshets onto the white plate where it would mix with the grease.
“I don’t think your contract allows you to ask us that,” Andy said.
“As a citizen I have my rights to know what your intentions are with these indecent investigations, sheriff. You have me marinating in the sewers and you expect my silence even as my spirit darkens.” He picked up a bag next to his feet. The tapes inside rattled against each other; there was a considerable bulk of them inside. “Adulterers. Not against the law. Moral law, no doubt, God’s law, but nothing legislated and nothing practiced by the judiciary beyond the expanding field of divorce attorneys. Pedophilia. Conspiracy, perhaps to commit murder. But intent without action.” He wiped his lips with his napkin. “You are spies, Sheriff, Writer. Those things, those titles are your masks.” He pushed the bag toward Andy and the sheriff set it on his lap without looking inside.
“What we are doesn’t concern you,” Andy said, and maybe now a part of him wanted desperately to touch his gun. More and more that urge was starting to concern him.
“I don’t care about what you really are. I only care about why you are so interested in people’s darkness. Evil begets evil.”
“You are here for surveillance. Not philosophy. Not sophistry.”
“That you’d assume I know what that word means compliments my purpose beyond just watching, Sheriff.” He cut a wedge of his egg with perfect precision and set it on his rye, taking a large bite as he gauged his interlocutors with that same calculation, that same cunning introspection that made the man so interesting, so dangerous, that made Paul Holdren’s decision to hire him so questionable because the very existence of this experiment, its efficiency, based its merits on its ability to remain unseen and unknown. “Next time please tell Mr Holdren to come see me himself. Especially when he makes such interesting requests. Though I know you won’t tell me why you’re so enamored with these strange people, understand when my curiosity is piqued I can make my own educated, and observable guesses.”
“You can do what you want,” Andy said, standing up now and adjusting his back as he let the bag of tapes hit his leg. “Always a pleasure, Mr Grimwood.”
The man at the table only politely nodded. When he looked at Trevor he smiled. “Writer.”
Trevor returned the favor. “Mr Grimwood.” Mr Spigget. He trembled. At a near unconscious level that same childhood fear came to the surface the same way he once imagined the janitor’s younger brother bobbed on the scrim of a dirty river, face purple with bloat and eyes swelled shut where old leaves dappled his skin like leeches. His own childhood fears shared a commonality with Adam’s. Mr Spigget was for him the same as what Lew called the Low Breed were to his boy, and that ever vicious and seething self-anger arose again; it tasted like guilt, but it was worse. Much worse. Because guilt was something he’d have to handle himself, something like responsibility. What he felt swam in the contentious pool of borrowing (stealing) his family’s comfort and sanity, their familiarity, and uprooting them so he could save some face in a little town meant to prove and authenticate his thesis. And maybe he saw a form of judgment in Grimwood’s eyes when he looked at him. It might not have been automatic, but he swore it was there. There like the palimpsest that was Spigget staring out at him from under the brim of a fedora. Trevor looked up at the frozen cashier, just watching them from behind the counter where the diner remained quiet. He felt as if the world stopped around Grimwood. That he somehow carried that sort of power. And it frightened him.
3
“He’s an asset. We’ve got to carry a few of them in this place. Our bidding and our intentions come at a cost.”
“He can use it as leverage. He always is. Playing with us. Like we were his food.”
Andy laughed. “Guys like Grimwood, they get off on that. Hell, I’m only wearing the badge because Holdren somehow convinced the Money Lenders on this project that it would be good for national PR. To peg in high positions certain like-minded thinkers because it would triangulate a sort of consistency. Mayor Jenkins is fond of a few things: money and prostitutes. Doesn’t matter how big or small the town, you have your assets, and they have their contingencies. My deputies, and I’m certain a handful of them would hate to be referred to as my playthings, hold a hell of a lot of animosity at certain decisions that has me wearing the Sheriff’s badge and not one of them. And they’ll take it out on others, because we project downward or laterally. Grimwood’s the same.”
“And those,” Trevor gestured toward the bag of tapes on the backseat. “If Holdren outright asked for backtape of persons of interest, don’t you think Grimwood will elect to perk at the sight of a few of those names popping up in the Post?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Am I?”
Andy looked at Trevor for a moment. Like he wasn’t sure where this was going. Trevor had come to Reedy Creek because Paul Holdren got him out of a jam. And maybe Andy was the same. A different kind of jam, but he knew he would probably never get another professorial job in academia after the hearings. His name wasn’t on a book cover under the auspices of that coveted New York Times Bestselling rubric all authors wore as some gloating halo, like Trevor Kramer for so many goddamn years, but it was under several peer-reviewed articles and award-winning poetry that he might or might not have written. Not even Mary knew the truth. And he liked it that way. But the tribunal at the hearing, after several case studies were brought to life, and witnesses for the university’s prosecutor were willing to testify—witnesses who’d been his fucking undergrads and willing to pen original content for him under permissive promises that he’d assist, in whatever ways he could, in their doctoral defenses—those words were theirs and not his, as if indicting him on the spot that he could not think creatively on his own. That he lacked independent application, which put on trial his entire career and doctorate.
“It’s a vote. Like it’s always been. Holdren said it himself. You need a reason to act. And he’s found one. Why you’re getting cold feet when it’s your fucking thesis grounding this has me concerned, Trevor.”
“Grimwood said it himself. I don’t believe in God. In fairy tales. Man has always been in the position to make that distinction. And we are. And here we are. Playing God.”
Andy turned into the school’s parking lot. Though he would not know it, four boys would soon turn up under those bleachers behind the diamond to make their own sort of decision: to tell the man in the fedora to stuff it. He only casually glanced out into the verdant field, pulling next to Hector Perez’s Corolla.
“Maybe that’s what we have to do. Become God. Because man keeps fucking up otherwise. Freedom was always such an illusion of poor foresight.” He killed the engine and got out of the cruiser.
4
“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose proportion has increased by around 35% from pre-industrial times. It absorbs radiation and retains heat. It is a carbon atom covalently bonded with two oxygen atoms. But this is Science 101. You all know this.” Paul Holdren was sitting at the head of the conference table in Hector Perez’s office; the sunlight was streaming over his face, showing the slight wisps of grey in his hair and in the tufts of chest hair peeking over the collar of his Polo shirt, something one might expect a yuppy to don before taking off to Greenwich for a comedy club after checking the indexes. Norris was to his right, and beside him sat Mary Napolitano, who casually sipped coffee and watched this man Andy had claimed was some sort of cultural artifice in the world of environmentalism. Like Patrick Moore, but without the heretic undertones that had that man jettisoning from his pet project, Greenpeace. At the end of the table was Hector, sitting comfortable in a white T-shirt far too small for what most would call his ample tits, and opposite Mary was Sheriff Andy, still in uniform and armed, and Trevor next to him, closest to Holdren. “Because CO2 is naturally occurring, because it is inherent to petroleum deposits, that 35% increase in its airborne ppm has to find some plausible correlation in our mechanization of everything. Fossil fuels. An easy villain. Because it’s been tied to the haves, and everybody loathes the haves. No matter your political affiliation, those men selling oil futures and drilling the North Dakota scape to mere scars while propping foreign dictators and allying themselves with OPEC magnates whose blood thirst precludes only their lust for young pussy are true enemies of the conscience, no matter if you pump gas into your Ford or not.
“But that’s what makes Reedy Creek special. It’s why I called you and why I even convened a council. The federal proposition to use ethanol, a cleaner and more sustainable fuel, so they tell us, is apropos of the intention moving forward long term, because our intent and motivation was for too long based on a fundamentally rickety structure. When the wolf ever came blowing, despite the fevered beliefs of its hard to sway adherents, the structure came tumbling down because it didn’t last long enough to permeate culture. Trevor,” he said, gesturing to Kramer next to him who only watched with curious fascination, “I hate to drag your friend through the mud here, but if I’m not mistaken, his books have outsold yours, so the merits of the competition here are based on even weaker struts. Paul Ehrlich. Everything he writes is festooned with the Marxist implications that capitalism, that economic growth comes adorned with a double-edged sword: as the indigent develop new wealth, their new output is just another form of irredeemable resource depletion. Christ, he’s constantly the herald of doomsdays; isn’t his piece of shit The Population Bomb, no doubt a reason why a few of you are even in this game, a propagandistic yarn declaring a famine and global starvation that would wipe out hundreds of millions? That other friend of yours, Trevor, so prevalent now in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Mr Scott Woods, he already dutifully made mincemeat of some of your Spaceship Earth theories in that dreadful debate that left you frozen staring at the camera as if you’d been struck dumb.” Paul smiled. It was a mean smile, something meant, perhaps, to indicate he knew Trevor and Andy were having conversations, sharing doubts about this project. “Everything we’ve been discussing has always been an intimation that our numbers and thus our consumption has been the problem. But that argument was always so hard to push beyond the fringes because men like Scott Woods were so apt to rhetorically disprove sensationalism by allying their efforts with capitalism’s growth. It was smart on their part. Is smart. But what if we suddenly used their progress against them?”
Everybody shifted. The council meeting was meant to discuss Stage Two of the project. The bundle of VHS tapes Grimwood had procured, with a hint of dispirited playfulness, was even sitting on the table. Begging to be talked about.
“I don’t understand,” Hector said, leaning forward with considerable effort. His chair groaned. “CO2 has been understandably discussed for years now. I even followed the Brundtland Commission in Villach, Austria in 1987, and they outlined four conceivable threats facing mankind: uh, pollution, acid rain, fear of another Chernobyl, and, well, global warming. In that exact term.”
“Your point?”
“Well, this isn’t new. Christ, if I’m not mistaken, this is just the Callendar Effect re-wrapped in easier to understand terminology. Guy Stewart Callendar published his research on carbon dioxide and temperature in the late 30s. Before World War II.”
“You answered your own question,” Paul said.
Hector blushed and then wiped the sweat from his brow; he gave Mary a curt glance and grabbed his glass of water. There were yellowing rings of sweat under his arms; it was hot in the office. Hector had a fan sitting unplugged on his desk by the computer, but beyond the sounds of Reedy Creek on a Sunday morning, it was just the interminable silence of the principal’s office.
“Why hasn’t global warming been discussed with more priority if the notion of its reality has been around since, as Hector so nicely pointed out, Callendar’s publication and inferences about the thermodynamics of steam? That’s the question. And a good one. Do you know the answer, Andy?”
The Sheriff looked down at his hands then shook his head. “Anything I’d say is a guess. Seems like you’d be more than happy to share it with us. So let’s get this thing moving.”
“Right, let’s,” Paul said, and Norris smiled next to him. It was an unkind smile, something one would imagine a lonely hobo might share if he ever found a stray cat and perched it on his lap while he decided whether to pet it or strangle it. “We busy ourselves on iconic thinking, on building to a terrible degree one specific villain upon which we defer our attention, our politics, our discourse. Because panic is easier to control when you know the name of the bad guy, when you can see and discuss the event snaring our attention. World War I and the rise of democracy over 19th century monarchical liberalism; the Depression, World War II and the Nazi menace; and of course, that beast of Communism and its trenchant Soviet puppeteer on the other side of the world with the same nuclear arsenal to end this Cold War. That’s your answer. Anthems are written about war because the enemy is always the Other. Now we all share the commonality of being bedfellows with global warming. Each and every one of us. Nobody can be singled out as innocent. How can Bruce Springsteen write a song about that and still appear patriotic?”
“Jesus,” Mary whispered.
“Just another pittance man uses to busy his mind from seeing the reality around him; that even though he worships and lives in pious accordance to some dogmatic decree, he is still guilty of building our greenhouse dome, like great little ants under a fucking magnifying glass of our own construction.”
“Then why lecture us? Why not write an op-ed and send it to the Times?”
Paul silently watched Andy for a moment; the little sheriff was certainly vocal today. But he expected that, didn’t he? Especially considering what they were going to have to do. “Words mean very little. Actions matter.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Norris added.
“People have always expected their elected superiors to make difficult decisions for them. Their votes aren’t just some idiotic show of allegiance to Democrats or Republicans to fit on a silly little spectrum; their votes are meant to wipe their consciences, to make them believe they made a difference by deferring their accountability to some uppity twat in Congress. To them, it’s the government’s responsibility to get things done. And the government gets things done to secure votes. A vicious little circle that Vonnegut might have called a catch-22 if he were in the room with us. It’s pandering on both sides. Nixon pandered to an environmental left pissed about Vietnam, pissed at Johnson and those Democratic blowhards who failed Kennedy’s legacy, and so he pre-empted some DNC subterfuge, perhaps in direct symbolic light of the coming Watergate crisis, by creating the EPA and then enacting the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act in ’72. During re-election. Because it would sway some people who wouldn’t otherwise vote for his stodgy ass. And it worked. Because people vote for accountability, and the government feigns accountability for the vote.”
Trevor remembered that act, he did. Because he asked Barb to marry him then. He remembered the Redwood trees, he remembered the breeze as Lew walked her down the leave-festooned trail, the straps of her sundress always slipping down her shoulders leaving her to deftly swoop them back up. The act was so sexual, so serene, and when she said “I do,” in that oh-so-traditional act of giving herself to him just to appease Lew and Betty, she threw off that wreath of flowers she wore in her hair, and it would forever remain in the woods in California. Forever. And now she waits. Waits by the phone to learn whether or not the tissue in her body will rot like the flowers had all those years ago, alone in the shade of the canopies. He shuddered.
“Jimmy Carter is the true bedfellow of global warming. If he hadn’t been a pussy with the Iranians, and actually combatted that iconic event with the might expected of Americans, he’d have won his re-election in ’80 and brought to light the realities of our ideas of progress. We destroy to move forward. Apt, but not a great slogan to sway the masses cause it isn’t feel good. But he spent the end of his presidency not just on the terms set by Americans but on the implications of that thesis, of unchecked progress in the world. His The Global 2000 Report to the President was of benefit to all with a mind open to changing his or her behaviour from constant consumption, to the tune of a 2 to 3 degrees centigrade rise in global temperatures at middle latitudes, and a goddamn sauna at the polar ice caps that will more than likely just flood the coasts and turn all we’ve taken for granted into barnacle shit. But history favored military strength, because history favors an easy villain. The Ayatollah.” Paul cleared his throat.
“So this council is, what, an alternative to missed opportunities made by the government?” Mary asked. She tapped the oak table with her fingers and looked at her husband, the sheriff, for momentary support.
“Thank you,” Paul whispered. “Somebody’s listening. We are accountable to and accountability for the people who rely on others getting their hands dirty so they can proceed in living unburdened by the consequences of their actions. Quick, please, everyone here, why are you an environmentalist, a conservationist? Why are you here?”
“Because of Project Gaia,” Norris said, steepling his fingers. “Because of you. Simple as that.”
“I read Susan Sontag. One thing in particular always stuck out for me, and I thought about it all the time. I memorized it. It seemed so powerful and astute: ‘The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx etc., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.’” Mary looked at each of them like one who’d just recited poetry at a public reading. And maybe for her she had. Maybe she had just recited the most beautiful verse she’d ever read and memories exploded that could no longer be contained. “Even with the emancipation of women, the freedoms expressed and, what you mentioned, the progress made, what has it amounted to? What have we done? I’ve lived with those questions. That’s why I’m here.” And Andy, of course. She didn’t say this out loud. She was here because Andy was invited; it was his first job opportunity since the hearings, and she knew he couldn’t turn it down.
“Beautiful,” Paul whispered, leaning forward to take her hand into his own. “Because this is bigger than any of us. Than any movement, than any revolution, because each of these has at its heart the core of change and progress. And progress is the enemy, isn’t it?”
Mary slowly nodded her head. “It is.” She wiped her eyes with her free hand and judged Andy’s reaction to Paul touching her with the affectionate gratitude of one expressing hope. And maybe desire? She wasn’t sure.
“Hector?”
The big principal only folded his arms, pushing together his tits and creating a protuberant fold in the cotton. “Though you mocked him, it was Paul Ehrlich. If I’m going to follow in Mrs Napolitano’s footsteps and recite something, which was breathtaking, dear, just beautiful, I’ll try to do the same, but I fear what I remember of his writing isn’t as articulate and poetic. Prosaic, if you will. But I fell for the fodder. I think Trevor might have too, judging by some of what he’s written.” He chuckled. “’Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and LA, um, the oceans will die of, die of DDT poisoning by ’79, and um, the expectancy, er, life expectancy will drop to 42 years of age by 1980’. Doomsday, yes, but it worked for me. Impressionable. Impressionable family. What Eisenhower called Wetbacks, but I came for the American Dream, but what dream could await me if I’d be dead in 1985? I turned forty-two then. Healthy as an ox.”
“And fat as one,” Norris said.
“If the ticker still works, I could give a fuck if I need a mirror to see my pecker. With apologies, Mrs Napolitano. Andy.” He nodded his head and Mary only quietly laughed.
“One person’s doomsday is another person’s transformation,” Paul said. “You have to respect that.”
“Thank you,” Hector replied, blushing again, hating the way Norris looked at him.
“So if this is a group kumbaya meant to ingratiate us with one another before we take serious action,” he gestured to the stack of tapes, “then I suppose I should throw in my two cents. I read everything you guys have. Put them on my syllabus. But Trevor, it was your book that really nailed it for me, because it wasn’t a recitation of facts or postulations, but an idea. An idea that even prompted Reedy Creek in the first place, right Paul? I mean, his thesis underlies the simple axiom that to combat over-population, you outlaw unregulated births and decree or stipulate a specific quota based on the death index. One life lost to one life gained. I thought it was rather brilliant. Brilliant enough to test out here. Robert Wilson, Clayton Miller, Collin Perkins. Names to be on the death index so a young, um, a young Sarah or Wilma can have a child without overburdening an already over-taxed system.” Andy crossed his arms. “It always made sense to me. Right up to when you called me and told me of this project, this experiment. I didn’t care what you might have done at Project Gaia because this was more important.”
Trevor closed his eyes; it seemed like a veiled threat, like Andy was holding Paul’s past for ransom, but he figured a guy like Holdren didn’t care. That what he might have done wasn’t a drop in the bucket compared to what he was going to fix. It was a noble gesture, for sure. But that axiom, the very foundation of his bestseller, the ammo that gave Scott Woods a loaded gun to leave him silent at the pulpit that last moment he ever felt like a true scholar, he couldn’t shake the reality of its conception. He couldn’t relieve himself of that specific guilt that the idea for The Population Problem wasn’t in its re-hashing of some of Ehrlich’s notions, but in the assuaging of his own consternation to have a kid and rationalizing it through the death of his mother-in-law. If Barb knew that’s when you truly got the inspiration to write, while she grieved, while she and Lew wept, while the coffin was still being lowered into the earth, she would never forgive you. Even if she is dying. Even if the doctor does call with bad news. If she knew the truth about how selfish your aspirations could be, cancer wouldn’t have to take her from you.
He cleared his throat: “Rachel Carlson. She changed my life. Before I got involved in student politics, in the SDS, it was her. It was Silent Spring. God, that book was so powerful. You said we relied on icons to betray our attention, that we needed the simplicity of villains to know we’re good. The binary is self-explanatory, yes, but Carlson, I think she changed that. I think she would have changed everything if she hadn’t died.” Of cancer, Trevor, cancer just like your wife, and maybe she found a lump under her breast in the shower too. Maybe your life is just a cycle in which the people you love will die just to prove and prove and prove your fucking axiom. “She convinced President Kennedy, her writing, her arguments, to get the Science Advisory Committee to study the dangers of pesticides. She convinced Kennedy to turn his attention away from the divisive Cold War rhetoric in order to recognize our common interest: the environment. One world. Spaceship earth. I watched her on CBS, just before she died in 1964. She was so eloquent. And prophetic. She saw what the 60s would become, what they would foment. I was a symbol of one side just like Lew, my father-in-law, he was a symbol of the other. Fuck, we hated each other.” He laughed. It was genuine and cathartic and for a moment he just wanted to chat with the ornery old prick. Banter with him. Because something about that brought back that distinct dichotomy expressed by Carlson. “She said in that interview, ‘I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.’ She was talking to me. Directly to me. I was this generation. It was the shove I needed to be better.”
“Yes, Rachel Carlson,” Paul said with enthusiasm. “She was a special woman. A great thinker and motivator, evincing the federal government to take action not as an incumbent gesture for votes, but for the good will of all mankind. Beyond the petty schisms of our ideological tracts. And so I’ve always assumed you noticed the similarities between Reedy Creek and Silent Spring, her ideal rural town of tomorrow in the heart of America struck by some invasive blight casting its malevolent spell: sudden inexplicable deaths, birds that cannot fly, dogs dying due to exposure to insecticides. The housewife who sprayed spiders with DDT only to contract acute leukemia and die. Perhaps a paean and early warning to Rachel herself. Reedy Creek is no different; its evils are just expressed differently. And just as Carlson convinced the president something needed to be done about DDT, we’re here to help solve an issue James Hansen just declared to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee: that the climate is changing, and that CO2 is the culprit. And what will that Committee do? Recite accountabilities to voters so the voters will hold them accountable. Nothing will change. We can sit here at this table and discuss our good intentions but words lack the teeth of actions. We are good people. And good people act.”
“What are you suggesting?” Hector asked.
“If carbon dioxide is the problem, my contention is that we are not the solution. How can we be, if we’ve evolved to aspirate the fucking gas enclosing us in a goddamn greenhouse?” Paul reached across the table and grabbed the VHS tape off the top of the stack. “So we choose who lives inside the greenhouse.”
