He took a deep breath and shook his head, feeling strange. He knew he was awake, nearly sober, relatively sane; but the sight was so luminous, so heavy with some meaning he couldn’t express.…
An idea struck him, and he walked under the tree. Standing foursquare he looked up; then threw his arms wide and shouted, “Hey!”
The tree exploded with birds! Flapping black wings, cawing wildly, crows burst away to every point of the compass, loose-winged, straggle-feathered, leaving black images of their powerful downstrokes against the delicate tracery of bare gray branches. Cawing, they regrouped in a swirl above the tree, then flew off to the west, a dancing irregular cloud of winged black dots. Oscar stood dazed, face to the sky, mouth hanging open.
7
Last week a nightmare. Landed at Dulles and arrested in Immigration. On a list, accused of violating the Hayes-Green Act. Swiss gov’t must have told them I was coming, flight number and everything. What do you mean? I shouted at officious official. I’m an American citizen! I haven’t broken any laws! Such a release to be able to speak my mind in my native tongue—everything pent up from the past weeks spilled out in a rush, I was really furious and shouting at him, and it felt so good but it was a mistake as he took a dislike to me.
Against the law to advocate overthrowing US gov’t.
What do you mean! I’ve never done anything of the kind!
Membership in California Lawyers for the Environment, right? Worked for American Socialist Legal Action Group, right?
So what? We never advocated anything but change!
Smirk of scorn, hatred. He knew he had me.
Got a lawyer but before he arrived they put me through physical and took blood sample. Told to stay in county. Next day told I tested positive for HIV virus. I’m sure this is a lie, Swiss test Ausländer every four months and no problem there, but told to remain county till follow-up tests analyzed. Possessions being held. Quarantine possible if results stay positive.
My lawyer says law is currently being challenged. Meanwhile I’m in a motel near his place. Called Pam and she suggested sending Liddy on to folks in OC so can deal better with things here. Put Liddy on plane this morning, poor girl crying for Pam, me too. Now two days to wait for test results.
Got to work. Got to. At local library, on an old manual typewriter. The book mocks: how can you, little worm crushed in gears, possibly aspire to me? Got to continue nevertheless. In a way it’s all I have left.
The problem of an adequate history bothers me still. I mean not my personal troubles, but the depression, the wars, the AIDS plague. (Fear.) Every day everything a little worse. Twelve years past the millenium, maybe the apocalyptics were just a bit early in their predictions, too tied to numbers. Maybe it just takes a while for the world to end.
Sometimes I read what I’ve written sick with anger, for them it’s all so easy. Oh to really be that narrator, to sit back and write with cool ironic detachment about individual characters and their little lives because those lives really mattered! Utopia is when our lives matter. I see him writing on a hilltop in an Orange County covered with trees, at a table under an olive tree, looking over a garden plain and the distant Pacific shining with sunlight, or on Mars, why not, chronicling how his new world was born out of the healthy fertility of the old earth mother, while I’m stuck here in 2012 with my wife an ocean to the east and my daughter a continent to the west, “enjoined not to leave the county” (the sheriff) and none of our lives matter a damn.
* * *
Days passed and Kevin never came down, never returned to feeling normal. Late that week, watching a news report on the Mars landing, it dawned on him that he was never going to feel normal again. This startled him, made him faintly uneasy.
Not that he wasn’t happy. When he recalled the night in the hills with Ramona he got lighter, physically lighter, especially when working or swimming. Exhilaration resisted gravity as if it were a direct counterforce. “Walking on air”—this extravagant figure of speech was actually an accurate description of a lived reality. Amazing.
But it had been such a strange night. It felt like a dream, parts of it seemed to slip away each time he thought of other things, so that he didn’t want to think of anything else, for fear the whole night might slip away. When he saw Ramona again, down at their streetwork, his heart skipped a beat, and shyly he looked down. Would she acknowledge it? Had it really happened?
Then when he looked up he saw that Ramona smile, a beacon of pleasure, black eyes looking right at him. She remembered too. If it was a dream, they had dreamed it together. Relief gave his exhilaration another lift, he slammed a pick into the broken asphalt and felt like he might be tossed aloft.
Now he was truly in love. And for the first time. Late bloomer indeed! Most of us first fall in love in our teens, it’s part of the intensity of those years, falling for some schoolmate, not so much because of the qualities of the loved one but because of a powerful unspoken desire to be in love. It is part of the growth of the soul. And though the actual nature of the loved one is not crucially important, it would not be true to say that first love is thereby lessened, or less intensely felt. On the contrary—because of its newness, perhaps, it is often felt with particular strength. Most adults forget this in the flood of events that the rest of life pours over them, or perhaps they’re disinclined to remember those years at all, filled as they were with foolishness, awkwardness, shame. Often enough first love was part of the awkwardness, inappropriately directed, poorly expressed, seldom reciprocated … we prefer not to remember. But remember with courage and you will feel again its biting power; few things since will have made you as joyfully, painfully alive.
Kevin Claiborne, however, had not fallen in love in adolescence—or, really, at any time thereafter. The desire never struck him, and no one he met inspired him to it. He had gone through life enjoying his sexual relationships, but something was missing, even if Kevin was only vaguely aware of it. Doris’s angry attempts to tell him that, years before, had alerted him to the fact that there was something others felt which he did not. It was confusing, because he felt that he loved—loved Doris, his friends, his family, his housemates, his teammates.… Apparently it wasn’t what she was talking about.
So the affair with Doris had ended almost as it began. And when Kevin felt romantic love for the first time, at the age of thirty-two, after years of work at home and abroad, after a thousand acquaintances and long years of experience with them, it was not because of the obscure adolescent desire to love somebody. Nor was it just forces in his own soul, though no doubt there was movement there too, as there always is, even if it is glacially slow. Instead it was a particular response, to Ramona Sanchez, his friend. She embodied what Kevin Claiborne loved most in women, he had known that for some time, somewhere in him. And when suddenly she became free and turned her attention to him—her affection to him—well, if Kevin’s soul had been glacially slow, then it was now like a certain glacier in Alaska, which had crawled for centuries until one year it crashed down hundreds of yards, cutting off a whole bay.
It was a remarkable thing, this being in love. It changed everything. When he worked it was with an extra charge of satisfaction, feeling the sensual rush of the labor. At home he felt like a good housemate, a good friend. People relaxed around him, they felt they were having a good time, they could talk to him—they always could, but now he seemed to have more to give back. At the pool he swam like a champion, the water was like air and he flew through it, loving the exertion. And he was playing ball better than ever. The hitting streak extended without any worry, it was just something that happened. It wasn’t very hard to hit a softball, after all. A smooth stroke, good timing, a line drive was almost inevitable. Was inevitable, apparently. He was 43 for 43 now, and everyone was calling him Mr. Thousand, making a terrible racket when he came to bat. He laughed, he didn’t care, the streak didn’t matter. And that made it easier.
And the time spent with Ramona. That morning in the
ir torn-up street he understood what it would be like—she was there, he could look over at her whenever he wanted, and there she would be, graceful, strong, unselfconsciously beautiful—and when she looked at him, he knew just what it said. I remember. I’m yours.
My God. It was love.
* * *
For Doris, the days after their party were like a truly enormous hangover. She felt queasy, disoriented, dizzy, and very irritable. One night when Hank was over for dinner she said angrily to him, “God damn it, Hank, somehow you always get me to drink about ten times more of your damned tequila than I really want to! Why do you do that!”
“Well, you know,” Hank said, looking sheepish. “I try to live by the old Greek rule, you know. Moderation in all things.”
“Moderation in all things!” Doris shouted, disgusted.
The rest of the table hooted. “Moderation in all things,” Rafael said, laughing. “Right, Hank, that’s you to a T.”
Nadezhda said, “I visited Rhodes once, where that saying was born. Cleobolus said it, around 650 B.C. The guide book I bought was a translation, and they had it ‘Measure is in all the best.’”
Andrea smiled. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it.”
“What the hell do you mean, Hank?” Doris demanded. “Just how does moderation in all things explain pounding twenty-five bottles of atrocious tequila?”
“Well, you know—if you say moderation in all things, then among all things you gotta include moderation itself, see what I mean? So you gotta go crazy once in a while, if you ask me.”
* * *
Then Tom showed up, and after dinner he and Doris began poring over the records Doris had taken from Avending. At one point Tom shook his head. “First of all, a lot of this looks to be coded. It may just be a cipher, but if it’s in cipher and coded too then we’re shit out of luck.”
Doris scowled.
“Besides,” Tom went on, “even if we break the code—hell, even with the straight stuff—it won’t make that much sense to me. I’m no financial records analyst, never have been.”
“I thought you might be able to see at least some trends,” Doris said.
“Well, maybe. But look, your friend John is not likely to have had access to Avending’s most intimate secrets anyway, especially if they’ve been involved in some funny stuff. His clearance just wouldn’t go that high.”
“Well, shit,” Doris said, “why did I bother to take this stuff in the first place!”
“Don’t ask me.”
Nadezhda said to Tom, “Don’t you have any friends left in Washington who could be helping you with this kind of problem?”
Tom considered it. “Maybe. I’ll have to make some calls. Here, while I’m doing that, sort this stuff into what’s in English and what’s coded. Where you can tell the difference.”
“Actually John’s clearance is pretty damn high,” Doris said.
Tom just shook his head and got on the TV. For a while he talked to a small gray-haired black woman, leaning back in a rotating chair; then to a tall man with a shiny bald head; then to the blank screen, for three or four conversations. There was a lot of incidental chat as he renewed old acquaintances, caught up on news: “Nylphonia, it’s me. Tom Barnard.”
“I thought you were dead.”
That sort of thing. Finally he got into a long conversation with a female voice and a blank screen, one punctuated several times by laughter. “That’ll take hours,” Tom said at one point. “We’ve got thousands of pages here.”
“That’s your problem,” the voice said. “If you want us to help, you’ll have to send it all along. Just stick them in front of the screen one at a time and I’ll set my end to photo. I’m off to breakfast anyway, and I’ll get back to you later when we’ve gone through them.”
“You think it’ll be worth it?”
“How do I know? But from what you’ve said, I think we’ll be able to come up with something. That much data should reveal the shape of the company’s financial relations, and if they’re hiding things, that’ll show in the shape of what they’re not hiding. We’ll show you.”
“What about the coding?”
Laughter.
“Well, thanks, Em.” Tom turned to Doris and Nadezhda. “Okay, we’ve got to put every one of these sheets of paper on the TV screen, and the better order they’re in, the easier it’ll be for my friends to analyze them.”
So they set to work getting the data transferred. Kevin came in and took his turn. Each sheet sat on the screen for only a second before there was a beep from the phone. Even so it took them until well into the night to get everything photographed. “And to think most of this stuff is irrelevant,” Doris said at one point.
“Worse for my friends than for us,” Tom replied.
“Are we going to have to pay them for this?”
“You bet. But it’s a whole network of friends we’re plugging into, and some of them owe me. We’ll figure something out after they’ve looked at this stuff.”
“What exactly will they be looking for?” Kevin asked.
“Infractions of the laws governing company size, capital dispersion and that sort of thing. Corporate law is a gigantic body of stuff, see, very complex. The main thrust of the twenty-forty international agreements was to cut down on the size of corporations, cut them down so far that only companies remain. It’s actually anti-corporate law, I mean that’s what we were doing for twenty-five years. We chopped up the corporations and left behind a teeming mass of small companies, and a bunch of associations and information networks—all well and good, but there are projects in this world that need a lot of capital to be carried off, and so mechanisms for that had to be instituted, new banking practices and company teamwork programs, and that’s where you get the morass of law dealing with that. Alfredo’s lawyers are undoubtedly playing all those angles and it may be that Avending has been brought in in a legal way, or it could be that there’s an illegal corporate ownership aspect to things. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t have used legal methods, it’s not that hard and a lot safer for their project. But they might be cutting corners—hell, it might have been forced on them, by someone with some leverage. The way Alfredo has introduced the zoning and water stuff…”
“It’s sure that Alfredo and his Heartech partners got to be hundreds damned fast,” Doris said.
“And live like more than hundreds,” Kevin added.
“Do they? Well, it’s worth looking into.”
* * *
A few days later the environmental impact statement was filed by Higgins, Ramirez and Bretner, and there it was in the town computer for anyone to call up and inspect. Kevin read it while eating lunch over at Oscar’s house. By the time he was done reading, he had lost his appetite. Theatrically he cast a half-eaten sandwich onto the table. These days even getting angry felt sort of good. “What do they mean erosion on the western side? There’s no erosion at all there!”
“Them ravines,” Hank said. “Must be erosion, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but it’s perfectly natural, I mean it isn’t accelerated or anything. I know every inch of that hill and there’s no unusual erosion at all there!”
Oscar came into the kitchen to make his own lunch. “Ah. HRB strikes again. Natural state equals erosion, litter, underuse. Sure.” He read the TV screen while putting together a Reuben sandwich. “See the way alternative four is slanted. Construction of a commercial center, paths to the peak—this is probably the best description of what Alfredo has in mind that we’ve seen so far. Parking lot down at the head of Crawford Canyon. This will help stop erosion on the western slope, clean up the refuse on the peak, add sightly landscaping, and increase town awareness and enjoyment of the prospect.”
“Shit,” Kevin said.
“That’s an LA Special all right. Hmm. Other alternatives are generally downplayed, I see. Hill turned into park, how can they downplay that? Ah. Would be a small addition to Santiago Park, which is already un
derutilized, and some seventeen percent of town property. Indeed.”
“Shit!” Kevin said.
Oscar went back to his sandwich. Environmental impact statements had come a long way since the early days, he told Hank and Kevin. LA’s Metropolitan Water Department had once submitted four unacceptable statements in a row, for instance, when attempting to finesse the fact that excessive mining of the groundwater in Owens Valley was going to destroy even the desert flora that had survived the earlier diversions of surface water. The obvious bias in those statements had been one factor in Inyo County’s eventual victory over LA, in the Sacramento courts and legislature; and every agency forced to submit an EIS had learned a lesson from that. Alternative uses had to be described in detail. Obvious harmful effects could not be ignored. The appearance, at least, of a complete and balanced study had to be maintained. “The days of ‘There is no environment here’ are over. Consulting firms like HRB are extremely sophisticated—they make their reputations by writing statements that will stand up to challenges. Complete, but still getting the job done, you know—making whatever impression the agency that hired them wants.”
“Well, shit!” Kevin said.
Gabriela, walking through the kitchen on her way to the roof, said “Time to poison his blood, hey Kev?”
That night Kevin made a chicken stroganoff dinner, while the others checked out the California Environmental Quality Act and the town charter, looking for ways to challenge the EIS.