Cloud Cuckoo Land (28 page)

“But isn't that,” Rex says, “what love is?” He rubs his temple, and drinks his tea, and glances at his wristwatch, and Zeno feels as though he has walked to the center of the frozen lake and fallen through the ice.

The birthday party falls on Zeno's last day. They take a black cab to a club called The Crash. Rex leans on Hillary's arm and says, “Let's try to keep it tame tonight, shall we?” and Hillary bats his lashes, and they descend into a series of connected rooms that get sequentially stranger and more dungeon-like, each stuffed with boys and men in silver boots or zebra leggings or top hats. Many of the men seem to know Rex, clasping him on the arm or kissing his cheeks or blowing party noisemakers at him, and several try to engage Zeno in conversation but the music is too loud, so he mostly nods and sweats in his polyester suit.

In a final room at the very bottom of the club Hillary appears carrying three glasses of gin, wobbling above the crowd in his high boots and emerald topcoat like a walking tree-god and the gin sends heat roaring through the corridors of Zeno's body. He tries to get Rex's attention, but the music doubles in volume, and as if by some signal, every man in the room begins to sing, “Hey hey hey hey hey,” as strobe lights in the walls switch on, transforming the room into a flip book, limbs ratcheting here and there, mouths leering, knees and elbows flashing, and Hillary tosses his drink in the air and wraps his tree limbs around Rex, everybody doing a version of the same
dance, launching first one, then the other arm toward the ceiling, as though shaping semaphores to one another, the air aflame with noise, and rather than let go, rather than join, Zeno feels so miserable, so deficient, so overwhelmed by his own naïveté—his cardboard suitcase, his all-wrong suit, his lumberjack boots, his Idaho manners, his misconceived hope that Rex invited him here because he wanted something romantic from him—
we could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud
. He is, he sees now, so much of a yokel that he's basically a barbarian. Amid the pulsing music and flickering bodies, he is surprised to find himself yearning for the monochromatic predictability of Lakeport: Mrs. Boydstun's afternoon whiskey, the unblinking porcelain children, the air striped with woodsmoke, and the silence over the lake.

He fights his way back up through the various rooms to the street and wanders frightened and ashamed through Vauxhall for two hours without any sense of where he is. When he finally gathers the nerve to wave down a cab and ask if he can be taken to a brick house in Camden beside a Gold Leaf cigarette sign, the cabbie nods and drives him directly to Rex's building. Zeno climbs the four flights and finds the door unlocked. A cup of tea has been left on the table. When, a few hours later, Hillary wakes him so that he does not miss his flight, he touches him on the forehead with a gesture so tender that Zeno has to turn away.

Outside Departures Rex parks the Austin, lifts a wrapped box from the backseat, and sets it on Zeno's lap.

Inside is a copy of Rex's
Compendium
and a bigger, thicker volume. “Liddell and Scott, a Greek-English lexicon. Indispensable. In case you wanted to take a crack at translating again.”

Outside the car a rush of passengers spurts past and for a moment the ground beneath Zeno's seat opens and he is swallowed and then he's back in the seat once more.

“You had a knack for it, you know. More than a knack.”

Zeno shakes his head.

Horns honk and Rex glances behind them. “Don't be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

Zeno gets out of the car, suitcase in his right hand, books under his left arm, something inside him (regret) thrusting to and fro like a spearman, pulverizing bone, destroying vital tissue. Rex leans over and puts out his right hand and Zeno squeezes it with his left, as awkward a handshake as there's ever been. Then the little car is swallowed by traffic.

FEBRUARY–MAY 2019

I
n February he and Janet huddle shoulder-to-shoulder over her smartphone in a corner of the cafeteria. “Gotta warn you,” she says, “he's kinda scary.” On-screen a little man in black denim and a goat mask paces back and forth across an auditorium stage. He goes by the name of “Bishop”; an assault rifle is slung over his back.
Start
, he says,

with the Book of Genesis. “Be fruitful,” it begins, “and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

The video cuts to a restless mash of faces.
For 2,600 years
, the man continues,

those of us in the Western tradition have been assured that the role of humanity is to subdue the earth. That all creation was created for us to harvest. And for 2,600 years we pretty much got away with it. Temperatures remained constant, seasons stayed predictable, and we cut down forests and fished out oceans and elevated one god above all others: Growth. Expand your property, increase your wealth, enlarge your walls. And when each new treasure you drag inside your walls doesn't relieve your pain? Go get some more. But now? Now the human species is beginning to reap what it has—

The bell sounds and Janet taps the screen and Bishop freezes mid-sentence, arms outstretched. A link flashes at the bottom of the screen: Join Us.

“Seymour, give me my phone. I need to get to Spanish.”

At the new Ilium terminal in the library, he puts on headphones and hunts down more videos. Bishop wears a Donald Duck mask, a raccoon mask, a Kwakiutl Nation beaver mask; he's in a clear-cut in Oregon, a village in Mozambique.

When Flora got married, she was fourteen. Now she has three kids and the village wells are dry and the nearest reliable water source is a two-hour walk from her home. Here in the Funhalouro District adolescent moms like Flora spend about six hours a day searching for and transporting water. Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels. This is not something we fix with tote bags.

Bishop is recruiting warriors, he says, to dismantle the global industrial economy before it's too late. They will, he says, rebuild societies around new thought systems, where resources will be shared; they will reclaim the old wisdom, seek answers to the questions commerce cannot answer, meet the needs money cannot meet.

The faces Seymour can make out in Bishop's audiences glow with purpose; he remembers how it felt, his whole body taut, when he sprung the lid off the crate of Pawpaw's old grenades for the first time. All that latent power. Never before has someone articulated his own anger and confusion like this.

“Wait,” they said. “Be patient,” they said. “Technology will solve the carbon crisis.” In Kyoto, in Copenhagen, in Doha, in Paris, they said, “We'll cut emissions, we'll wean ourselves off hydrocarbons,” and they rolled back to the airport in armor-plated limos and flew home on jumbo jets and ate sushi thirty thousand feet in the air while poor people choked on the air in their own neighborhoods. Waiting is over. Patience is over. We must rise up now, before the whole world is on fire. We must—

When Marian fans a hand in front of his eyes, for a few breaths Seymour cannot remember where he is.

“Anyone home?”

The link flashes Join Us Join Us Join Us. He takes off the headphones.

Marian swings her car keys around one finger. “Closing time, kiddo. Can you turn off the
Open
sign for me, please? And, listen, Seymour, are you free Saturday? At noon?”

He nods, collects his book bag. Outside rain is falling on the old snow and the streets are full of slush.

“Saturday,” Marian calls after him. “Noon. Don't forget. I have a surprise for you.”

At home Bunny is at the kitchen table frowning over the checkbook. She looks up, her attention returning from a long way off.

“How was your day? Did you walk all the way home in the rain? Did you sit with Janet at lunch?”

He opens the fridge. Mustard. Shasta Twists. Half a bottle of ranch dressing. Nothing.

“Seymour? Can you look at me, please?”

In the glare of the kitchen bulb, her cheeks look made of chalk. Her throat sags; her roots show; her upper spine has begun to hunch. How many hotel toilets did she scrub today? How many beds did she strip? Watching the years take Bunny's youth has been like watching the forest behind the house go down all over again.

“Listen, honey, the Aspen Leaf is shutting down. Geoff said they can't compete with the chains anymore. He's letting me go.”

Envelopes litter the table. V-1 Propane, Intermountain Gas, Blue River Bank, Lakeport Utilities. His medication alone, he knows, costs $119 a week.

“I don't want you to worry, honey. We'll figure something out. We always do.”

He skips math, crouches in the parking lot with Janet's phone.

In a world warmer by two degrees centigrade, 150 million more people—most of them poor—will die from air pollution alone. Not violence, not floods, just inferior air. That's 150 times more fatalities than the American Civil War. Fifteen Holocausts. Two World War Twos. In our actions, in our attempts to throw some wrenches into the market economy, we hope that no one will die. But if there are a few deaths, isn't it still worth it? To stop fifteen Holocausts?

A tap on his shoulder. Janet shivers on the curb. “This is getting annoying, Seymour. I have to ask for my phone back five times a day.”

Friday he comes home from school to find Bunny drinking wine from a plastic cup on the love seat. She beams, takes his backpack off his shoulder, and curtsies. She has, she announces, taken out a payday loan to see them through until she finds a new job. And on the way home, she was passing by the Computer Shack beside the lumber yard, and had to stop.

From behind the cushion she produces a brand-new Ilium tablet computer, still in its box. “Voilà!”

She grins. The burgundy she has been drinking makes her teeth look as though she has been eating ink.

“And remember Dodds Hayden? At the store? He threw this
in for free!” Next from behind the cushion she produces an Ilium smart speaker. “It tells the weather and plays trivia and remembers shopping lists. You can order pizza just by talking to it!”

“Mom.”

“I'm happy to see you doing so well, Possum, spending time with Janet, and I know it's hard to be the kid without the new tech stuff, and I thought, well, you deserve it. We deserve it. Don't we?”

“Mom.”

Out the sliding door the lights of Eden's Gate shimmer as though borne along by an underwater current.

“Mom, you need Wi-Fi to use these.”

“Huh?” She sips her wine. Her shoulders deflate. “Wi-Fi?”

Saturday he walks to the ice rink, sits on a bench high above the swirling skaters, switches on the new tablet, and logs on to the wireless network. It takes a half hour to download all the updates. Then he watches a dozen videos of Bishop, everything he can find, and by the time he remembers Marian's invitation, it's after 3 p.m. He scurries up the block: at the corner of Lake and Park, bolted to the concrete, is a brand-new book drop box painted to look like an owl.

It's a fat cylinder, painted gray, brown, and white, and looks as if it has wings pressed to its sides and talons on its feet. Big yellow eyes glow in the center of its face and it wears a little bow tie: a great grey.

Across the door it says,
PLEASE RETURN BOOKS HERE
. On its breast:

LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

“OWL” YOU NEED ARE BOOKS!

The front door of the library opens and Marian bustles out with her bag and keys wearing a cherry-red parka and her buttons are done up wrong and her expression is hurt or angry or annoyed or all three.

“You missed the dedication. I asked everybody to wait.”

“I—”

“I reminded you twice, Seymour.” The painted owl seems to fix accusatory eyes on him as Marian tugs up her collar. “You know,” she says, “you're not the only person in the world,” and gets in her Subaru and drives away.

April is warmer than it should be. He stops going to the library, skips Environmental Awareness Club meetings, dodges Mrs. Tweedy in the halls. After school he sits on a low wall behind the ice rink, in Wi-Fi range, and chases Bishop's videos into ever shadier corners of the internet.
Humans are best understood as exterminators,
he says.
Every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves.

One for the toilet, one for the sink—Seymour stops taking the buspirone. For several days his body crashes. Then it wakes up. Sensations roar back; his mind feels as if it becomes the huge, curved mirror of a radar telescope, gathering light from the farthest corners of the universe. Every time he steps outside, he can hear the clouds grinding through the sky.

“How come,” Janet asks one day as she drives him home, “you never want to meet my parents?”

A dump truck rumbles past. Out there Bishop's warriors are gathering. Seymour feels as though he is preparing for a metamorphosis; he can almost feel himself breaking down at the molecular level, building himself into an entirely new thing.

Janet pulls up in front of the double-wide. He balls his hands into fists.

“I'm talking,” she says, “but you're not listening. What's going on with you?”

“Nothing's going on with me.”

“Just get out of the car, Seymour.”

They call us militants and terrorists. They argue that change takes time. But there is no time. We can no longer live in a world culture where the rich are allowed to believe that their way of life has no consequences, that they can use whatever they want and throw away whatever they want, that they are immune to catastrophe. I know that it's not easy to have your eyes opened. It's not fun. We will all have to be strong. The coming events will test us in ways we cannot yet imagine.

The link flashes Join Us Join Us Join Us.

He studies the Eden's Gate townhomes closest to the double-wide, looking for the ones with no signs of life, whose owners are clearly somewhere else, and on the fifteenth of May, while Bunny is working a dinner shift at the Pig N' Pancake, he crosses the backyard past the egg-shaped boulder and hops the ranch-rail fence and scurries through the shadows trying various windows. When he finds one that is unlocked, he climbs through the blinds and stands in the dimness.

The oven clock sends a soft green glow through the kitchen.

The modem is in the hall closet. The network name and password are taped to the wall. For a few breaths he stands in someone else's life: a magnet on the refrigerator reads
Beer: The Reason I Wake Up Every Afternoon
; a framed family photo on the sideboard; the lingering odors of coffee and last weekend's Crock-Pot; an empty dog bowl by the pantry. Four ski helmets hang on hooks by the front door.

In the grocery store, people push carts full of brightly packaged food, none of them realizing they stand beneath the towering wall of a dam about to give way. A boxed cake studded with blue and yellow frosting-stars that says
Congratulations, Sue
is seventy-five percent off. He keeps his ear defenders on in the checkout line.

When Bunny gets home she pulls off her shoes and says, “What's this?”

Seymour sets two pieces of cake on plates and carries over the blue Ilium smart speaker. Bunny looks at him. “I thought—”

“Try it.”

She leans over the capsule. “Hello?”

A little green light draws a circle around the rim.
Hello
. It sounds vaguely British.
I'm Maxwell. What's your name?

Bunny claps her hands to her cheeks. “I'm Bunny.”

Lovely to meet you, Bunny. Happy birthday. What may I do for you this evening?

She looks at Seymour, mouth open.

“Maxwell, I would like to order a pizza.”

Absolutely, Bunny. What size?

“Large. With mushrooms. And sausage.”

One moment
, says the capsule and the green dot trundles and she grins her beautiful doomed smile and Seymour feels the world around him crumble a little bit more.

A week later Janet parks the Audi downtown and they buy ice cream and Janet tells the girl behind the counter that she should use compostable spoons instead of plastic ones and the girl says, “You want sprinkles or not?”

They sit on boulders overlooking the lake and eat their ice cream and Janet takes out her phone. To their left, in the marina parking lot, idles a thirty-two-foot RV with slide-outs on either side and two air-conditioning condenser units on the roof. A man gets out, sets down a little leashed poodle, and walks it around the bend.

“When everything falls apart,” Seymour says, “guys like him will be the first to go.”

Janet pokes the screen of her phone. Seymour fidgets. The roar is close today; he can hear it crackling like a wildfire. From where they sit he can see into the core of downtown to the newly remodeled Eden's Gate Realty office beside the library.

The RV has Montana plates. Hydraulic jacks. A satellite TV dish.

“He went to walk his dog,” he says, “but left the engine running.”

Beside him Janet takes a photo of herself, then deletes it. Over the lake the eyes of Trustyfriend open, two yellow moons.

In the grass at the edge of the marina lot Seymour spies a round piece of granite as big as a baby's head. He walks to it. It's heavier than it looks.