Green Earth

“How’s it going?” “How’s it going?”

The two of them were jacked up by the storm and the chance to do something. No doubt it had been a long couple of weeks for them too, no work to go to, nothing to do. Well, they would have been out in the surf, or otherwise active. But here they were now, and Leo was glad.

Quickly they all got into the flow of the work, trundling rocks out to the cliff. Once Leo found himself following Marta down the plank line, and he watched her bunched shoulders and soaking black curls with a sudden blaze of friendship and admiration. She was a surfer gal, slim hips, broad shoulders, raising her head to the wind and howling back at it. He was going to miss her. Brian too. It had been good of them to come by like this, but the nature of things was such that they would all find other work, and then they would drift apart. It never lasted with old work colleagues, the bond just wasn’t strong enough. Work was always a matter of showing up and then enjoying the people who had been hired to work there too. Not only their banter, but also the way they did the work. They had been a good lab.

The Army guys were waving them back from the edge of the cliff. It had been a lawn and now it was all torn up, and there was a guy there crouching over a big metal box, USGS printed on his soaking windbreaker. Brian shouted in their ears: they had found a fracture in the sandstone parallel to the cliff’s edge here, and apparently someone had felt the ground slump a little, and the USGS guy’s instrumentation was indicating movement. It was going to go. Everyone dumped their rocks and hustled the empty wheelbarrows back to Neptune.

Just in time. With a short dull roar and whump that almost could have been the impact of a really big wave, the cliff edge slumped and disappeared. The crowd let out a shout that was audible above the wind. Now they could see through space to the gray sea hundreds of yards offshore. The new cliff edge was fifteen feet closer to them.

Very, very spooky. Leo and Brian and Marta drifted forward with the rest, to glimpse the dirty rage of water below. The break in the cliff extended about a hundred yards to the south, maybe fifty to the north. A modest loss in the overall scheme of things, but this was the way it was happening, one little break at a time, all up and down this stretch of coast. There was a whole series of faults parallel to the cliff, so that it was likely to flake off piece by piece as the waves gouged away support from below. That was how A, B, and C Streets had gone in a single night. It could happen all the way inland to the coast highway.

Amazing. Leo could only hope that Roxanne’s mother’s house had been built on one of the more solid sections of the bluff. It had always seemed that way when he descended the nearby staircase and checked it out; it stood over a kind of buttress of stone. But as he watched the ocean flail, and felt the wind strike them, there was no reason to think any section would hold. A whole neighborhood could go. And all up and down the coast people had built close to the edge, so it would be much the same in many other places.

No house had gone over in the slump they had just witnessed, but one at the southern end of it had lost part of its west wall and been torn open to the wind. Everyone stood around staring, pointing, shouting unheard in the roar of wind. Milling about, running hither and thither, trying to get a view.

There was nothing else to be done at this point. The end of their plank road was gone along with everything else. The Army and county guys were getting out sawhorses and rolls of orange plastic stripping; they were going to cordon off the street and shift the work efforts to safer platforms.

“Wow,” Leo said to the storm, feeling the word ripped out of his mouth and flung to the east. “My Lord, what a wind.” He shouted to Marta: “We were standing right out there!”

“Gone!” Marta shouted. “Gone like Torrey Pines Generique!”

Brian and Leo shouted agreement. Into the sea with the damned place!

They retreated to the lee of Marta’s little Toyota pickup, sat on the curb behind its slight protection, and drank some espressos she had in the cab, already cold in paper cups with plastic tops.

“There’ll be more work,” Leo told them.

“That’s for sure.” But they meant boulder work. “I heard the coast highway is cut just south of Cardiff,” Brian said. “Restaurant Row is totally gone. The overpass fell in and then the water started ripping both ways at the roadbed.”

“Wow!”

“It’s going to be a mess. I bet that will happen at the Torrey Pines river mouth too.”

“All the big lagoons.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

They sipped their espressos.

“It’s good to see you guys!” Leo said. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the worst part of this whole thing,” Leo said.

“Yeah.”

“Too bad they didn’t hang on to us—they’re putting all their eggs in one basket now.”

Marta and Brian regarded Leo. He wondered which part of what he had just said they disagreed with. Now that they weren’t working for him, he had no right to grill them about it. On the other hand, there was no reason to hold back either.

“What?” he exclaimed.

“I just got hired by Small Delivery Systems,” Marta said, still almost shouting to be heard over the noise. She glanced at Leo uncomfortably. “Eleanor Dufours is working for them now, and she hired me. They want us to work on that algae stuff we’ve been doing.”

“Oh I see! Well good! Good for you.”

“Yeah, well. Atlanta!”

There was a whistle from the Army guys. A whole gang of people were trooping behind them down Neptune, south to another dump truck that had just arrived. There was more to be done.

Leo and Marta and Brian followed, went back to work. Some people left, others arrived. Lots of people were documenting events on their phones and cameras. As the day wore on, the volunteers were glad to take heavy-duty work gloves from the Army guys to protect their palms from further blistering.

About two that afternoon the three of them decided to call it quits. Their palms were trashed. Leo’s thighs and lower back were getting shaky, and he was hungry. The cliff work would go on, and there would be no shortage of volunteers while the storm lasted. The need was evident, and besides it was fun to be out in the blast, doing something. Working made it seem practical to be out there, although many would have been out anyway, to watch the tumult.

The three of them stood on a point just north of Swami’s, leaning into the storm and marveling at the spectacle. Marta was bouncing a little in place, stuffed with energy, totally fired up; she seemed both exhilarated and furious, and shouted at the biggest waves when they struck the stubborn little cliff at Pipes. “Look at that! Outside!” She was soaking wet, as they all were, the rain plastering her curls to her head, the wind plastering her shirt to her torso; she looked like the winner of some kind of extreme-sport wet T-shirt contest, her breasts and belly button and ribs and collarbones and abs all perfectly delineated under the thin wet cloth. She was a power, a San Diego surf goddess, and good for her that she had gotten hired by Small Delivery Systems. Again Leo felt a glow for this wild young colleague of his.

“This is so great!” he shouted. “I’d rather do this than work in the lab!”

Brian laughed. “They don’t pay you for this, Leo.”

“Ah hey. Fuck that. This is still better.” And he howled at the storm.

Then Brian and Marta gave him hugs; they were taking off.

“Let’s try to stay in touch you guys,” Leo said sentimentally. “Let’s really do it. Who knows, we may all end up working together again someday anyway.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll probably be available,” Brian said.

Marta shrugged, looking away. “We either will be or we won’t.”

Then they were off. Leo waved at Marta’s receding truck. A sudden pang—would he ever see them again? The reflection of the truck’s taillights smeared in two red lines over the street’s wet asphalt. Blinking right turn signal—then they were gone.

CHAPTER 10

BROADER IMPACTS

It takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well-off, a lot are just getting by, a lot are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried residual patterns of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organize ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and that is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think.

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing much happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that will link the generations, history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits—guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine—love, hope, fear, selfishness—all recombining again and again, until a miracle happens

and the organism springs forth!

Charlie struggled to his feet and stood next to his bed, hands thrown out like a nineteenth-century boxer.

“What?” he shouted at the loud noise.

It was not an alarm. It was Joe in the room, wailing. He stared at his father amazed. “Ba.”

“Jesus, Joe.” The itchiness began to burn across Charlie’s chest and arms. He had tossed and turned in misery most of the night, as he had every night since encountering the poison ivy. He had probably fallen asleep only an hour or two before. “What time is it? Joe, it’s not even seven! Don’t yell like that. All you have to do is tap me on the shoulder if I’m still asleep, and say, ‘Good morning Dad, can you warm up a bottle for me?’”

Joe approached and tapped his leg, staring peacefully at him. “Mo da. Wa ba.”

“Wow Joe. Really good! Say, I’ll get you your bottle warmed up right away! Very good! Hey listen, have you pooped in your diaper yet? You might want to pull it down and sit on your own toilet in the bathroom like a big boy, poop like Nick, and then come on down to the kitchen and your bottle will be ready. Doesn’t that sound good?”

“Ga da.” Joe trundled off toward the bathroom.

Charlie, amazed, padded after Joe and descended the stairs as gently as he could, hoping not to stimulate his itches. In the kitchen the air was delightfully cool and silky. Nick was there reading a book. Without looking up he said, “I want to go down to the park and play.”

“I thought you had homework to do.”

“Well, sort of. But I want to play.”

“Why don’t you do your homework first and then play, that way when you play you’ll be able to really enjoy it.”

Nick cocked his head. “That’s true. Okay, I’ll go do my homework first.” He slipped out, book under his arm.

“Oh, and take your shoes up to your room while you’re on your way.”

“Sure Dad.”

Charlie stared in his reflection in the side of the stove hood. His eyes were round.

“Hmm,” he said. He got Joe’s bottle in its pot, stuck an earphone in his left ear. “Phone, give me Phil … Hello, Phil, look I wanted to catch you while the thought was fresh, I was thinking that if we introduced the Chinese aerosols bill again, we could catch the whole air problem at a fulcrum and either start a process that would finish with the coal plants here on the East Coast, or else it would serve as a stalking horse, see what I mean?”

“Hmm, good idea Charlie, I’d forgotten that bill, but it was a good one. I’ll give that a try. Call Roy and tell him to get it ready.”

“Sure Phil, consider it done.”

Charlie took the bottle out of the pot and dried it. Joe appeared in the door, naked, holding up his diaper for Charlie’s inspection.

“Wow Joe, very good! You pooped in your toilet? Very good, here’s your bottle all ready, what a perfect kind of Pavlovian reward.”

Joe snatched the bottle from Charlie’s hand and waddled off, a length of toilet paper trailing behind him, one end stuck between the halves of his butt.

Holy shit, Charlie thought. So to speak.

He called up Roy and told him Phil had authorized the reintroduction of the Chinese bill. Roy was incredulous. “What do you mean, we went down big-time on that, it was a joke then and it would be worse now!”

“Not so, it lost bad but that was good, we got lots of credit for it that we deployed elsewhere, and it’ll happen the same way when we do it again because it’s right, Roy, we have right on our side on this.”

“Yes of course obviously but that’s not the point—”

“Not the point? Have we gotten so jaded that being right is no longer relevant?”

“No of course not, but that’s not the point either, it’s like playing a chess game, each move is just a move in the larger game, you know?”

“Yes I do know because that’s my analogy, but that’s my point, this is a good move, this checks them, and they have to give up a queen to stop from being checkmated.”

“You really think it’s that much leverage? Why?”

“Because Winston has such ties to Chinese industry, and he can’t defend that very well to his constituency, Christian realpolitik isn’t a coherent philosophy and so it’s a vulnerability he has don’t you see?”

“Well yeah, of course. You said Phil okayed it already?”

“Yes he did.”

“Okay, that’s good enough for me.”

Charlie got off and did a little dance in the kitchen, circling out into the living room, where Joe was sitting on the floor trying to get back into his diaper. Both adhesive tags had torn loose. “Good try Joe, here let me help you.”

“Okay da.” Joe held out the diaper.

“Hmm,” Charlie said, suddenly suspicious.

He called up Anna and got her. “Hey snooks, how are you, yeah I’m just calling to say I love you and to suggest that we get tickets to fly to Jamaica, we’ll find some kind of kid care and go down there just by ourselves, we’ll rent a whole beach to ourselves and spend a week down there or maybe two, it would be good for us.”

“True.”

“It’s really inexpensive down there now because of the unrest and all, so we’ll have it to ourselves almost.”

“True.”

“So I’ll just call up the travel agent and have them put it all on my business expenses card.”

“Okay, go for it.”

Then there was a kind of wet cracking sound, and Charlie woke up.

“Ah shit.”

He knew just what had happened, because it had happened before. His dreaming mind had grown skeptical at something in a dream that was going too well or badly—in this case, his implausibly powerful persuasiveness—and so he had dreamed ever-more-unlikely scenarios, in a kind of test-to-destruction, until the dream had popped.

It was almost funny, this relationship to dreams. Except sometimes they crashed at the most inopportune moments. It was perverse to probe the limits of believability rather than just go with the flow, but that was the way Charlie’s mind worked, apparently. Nothing he could do about it but groan and laugh, and try to train his sleeping mind into a more wish-fulfillment-tolerant response.

It turned out that in the waking world it was a work-at-home day for Anna, scheduled to give Charlie a kind of poison ivy vacation from Joe. Charlie was planning to take advantage of that to go down to the office by himself for once, and have a talk with Phil about what to do next. It was crucial to get Phil on line for a set of small bills that would save the best of the comprehensive.

He padded downstairs to find Anna cooking pancakes for the boys. Joe liked to use them as little frisbees. “Morning babe.”

“Hi hon.” He kissed her on the ear, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I just had the most amazing dream. I could talk anybody into anything.”

“How exactly was that a dream?”

“Yeah right! Don’t tease me, obviously I can’t talk anybody into anything. No, this was definitely a dream. In fact I pushed it too far and killed it. I tried to talk you into going off with me to Jamaica, and you said yes.”

She laughed merrily at the thought, and he laughed to see her laugh, and at the memory of the dream. And then it seemed like a gift instead of a mockery.

He scanned the kitchen computer screen for the news. Stormy Monday, it proclaimed. Big storms were swirling up out of the subtropics, and the freshly minted blue of the Arctic Ocean was dotted by a daisy chain of white patches, all falling south. Polar vortexes. The highest satellite photos, covering most of the Northern Hemisphere, reminded Charlie of how his skin had looked right after his outbreak of poison ivy. A huge white blister had covered Southern California the day before; another was headed their way from Canada, this one a real bruiser—big, wet, slightly warmer than usual, pouring down on them from Saskatchewan.

The media meteorologists were already in a lather of anticipation, not only over the Arctic blast but also a tropical storm now leaving the Bahamas.

“Not that impressive, this guy calls it! My God, everybody’s a critic. Now people are reviewing the weather.”

“‘Tasteful little cirrus clouds,’” Anna quoted from somewhere.

“Yeah. And I heard someone talking about ‘an ostentatious thunderhead.’”

“It’s the melodrama,” Anna guessed. “Climate as bad art, as soap opera. Or some kind of reality show. Do you think you should stay home?”

“No it’ll be okay. I’ll just be at work.”

“Okay.” This made sense to Anna; it took a lot to keep her from going to work. “But be careful.”

“I will. I’ll be indoors.”

Charlie went upstairs to get ready. A trip out without Joe! It was like a little adventure.

Although when he was out the door and walking up Wisconsin, he found he kind of missed his little puppetmaster. He stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change, and when a tall semi rumbled by he said aloud, “Oooh, big truck!” which caused the others waiting for the light to give him a look. Embarrassing. But it was truly hard to remember he was alone. His shoulders kept flexing at the unaccustomed lack of weight. The back of his neck felt the wind on it. It was somehow an awful realization: he would rather have had Joe along. “Jesus, Quibler, what are you coming to.”

It was good, however, not to have the straps of the baby backpack cutting across his chest. Even without them the poison ivy damage was prickling at the touch of his shirt and the first sheen of sweat. Since the encounter with the tree he had slept so poorly, spending so much of every night awake in an agony of unscratchable itching, that he felt thoroughly and completely deranged. His doctor had prescribed powerful oral steroids, and given him a shot of them too, so maybe that was part of it. That or simply the itching itself. Putting on clothes was like a kind of skin-deep electrocution.

It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping into it through the portals of his senses.

He took the Metro to Dupont Circle, got off there just to take a walk without Joe. He stopped at Kramer’s and got an espresso to go, then started around the circle to check the Dupont Second Story, but stopped when he realized he was doing exactly the things he would have done if he had had Joe with him.

He carried on southeastward instead, strolling down Connecticut toward the Mall. As he walked he admired a great spectacle of clouds overhead, vast towers of pearly white lobes blooming upward into a high pale sky.

He stopped at the wonderful map store on Eye Street, and for a while lost himself in the cloud shapes of other countries. Back outside the real clouds were growing in place rather than heaving in from the west or the southeast. Brilliant anvil heads were blossoming sixty thousand feet overhead, forming a hyper-Himalaya that looked as solid as marble.

He pulled out his phone and put it in his left ear. “Phone, call Roy.”

After a second: “Roy Anastophoulus.”

“Roy, it’s Charlie. I’m coming on in.”

“I’m not there.”

“Ah come on!”

“I know. When was the last time I actually saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going in for?”

“I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”

“That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”

“Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”

“That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”

“How could I not.”

“They say it’s going to rain really hard.”

“Looks like I’ll beat it to the office, though.”

“Good. Hey listen, when Phil gets in, don’t be too hard on him. He already feels bad enough.”

“He does?”

“Well, no. Not really. I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?”

“Never.”

“Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he went in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.”

“But it is us-and-them.”

“True. But he takes the long view. Later some of the thems will be part of an us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the way to go. We’ll get back a lot of this stuff later.”

“Maybe. We never tried the Chinese aerosols again.”

“Not yet.”

Charlie stopped listening to check the street he was crossing. When he started listening again Roy was saying, “So you dreamed you were Xenophon, eh?”

“How’s that?”

“Xenophon. He wrote the Anabasis, which tells the story of how he and a bunch of Greek mercenaries got stuck and had to fight their way across Turkey to get home to Greece. They argue the whole time about what to do, and Xenophon wins every argument, and all his plans always work perfectly. I think of it as the first great political fantasy novel. So who else did you convince?”

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