Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (12 page)

Praxis found her in the upstairs bathroom, across from her own bedroom and down the hall from the master suite. She was lying facedown on the marble floor, one arm angled up and the other down, like a broken semaphore. Her hips were cocked and legs spread out, with her toes pointing in. She was dressed, as he had often seen her in the morning, in a blue chambray blouse, khaki slacks, and red-velvet bedroom slippers. Her face was turned toward—or rather pulled away from, leaving a filmy smear—a puddle of clear bile edged with greenish froth. It smelled sourly of stomach acid and Jim Beam. She most have gone into the bathroom for something, stumbled or simply passed out, fallen, and then vomited.

“Adele!” he called, suddenly afraid of her terrible inertness.

“Adele!” He knelt beside her, wedging between the tub and toilet bowl.

“
Adele!
” He touched her shoulder, shook it, and her upper body rolled loosely.

If she had breathed in any of that vomit, she might have drowned. He shook her again and lifted her face away from the puddle. That action stirred something, because Adele coughed once, back in her throat, and started snoring.

“Come on, dear,” he said softly. “You can’t lie here.”

Praxis managed to stand over his wife, work his hands in under her armpits, and lift with his thumbs pressing at the soft flesh over her shoulderblades. He walked backward, pulling her up from the floor, onto her knees, and then upright and sagging against him. He half-walked, half-carried Adele into her bedroom, sat her down on the bed, and laid her across the quilted coverlet. He got dampened towels from the bathroom and wiped her mouth and face. He removed her slippers and clothing, then rolled her to one side, pulled at the bedclothes, and rolled her back, until she was lying under the sheets.

He went to the medicine cabinet and got her bottles of aspirin and vitamin C and a big glass of cold water. He removed the child-guard caps, which Adele always found so difficult, and set everything up on her night table. He went back into the bathroom and used more towels to clean up the puddle. Then he sat down on the chair at her dressing table to watch and make sure she was breathing easily and not going to vomit again.

It had been two or three months since he had last found her like this. Usually, she was asleep in her chair in front of the television, or on the couch with a magazine in her lap, and would rouse easily enough with a bit of coaxing. Most nights she was already in bed and snoring.

He couldn’t help comparing Adele, who was willfully extinguishing her mind with alcohol, to Antigone Wells, who had suffered a massive vascular accident that took away her mind and then had fought bravely to regain her memory, her skills, and her mental acuity. The two women were enough alike in age—allowing Adele a few extra years—but they seemed a generation apart. Antigone’s face was clear and her eyes bright, her manner alive, her movements quick, and her outlook positive. Adele’s face was puffy and her eyes clouded, her manner dead, her movements slowed, and her outlook negative.

Praxis knew he was being disloyal, but there it was. His wife was killing herself slowly. His new attorney—his former nemesis and then his friend from the hospital rooftop—had dragged herself back from extinction.

He looked at Adele’s sagging face, tipped back and snoring, and wondered what it would feel like to see Antigone sitting there in bed. She would be smiling, sharp witted, erect, ready for anything. …

It didn’t pay to have such thoughts. He was too old to learn how to betray his wife, take on a mistress, and keep half of his life hidden in secrets.

And Antigone Wells, he suspected, was not the sort of woman to accept a life in obscurity living with just half a man.

* * *

“Quick, turn on CNN!” Antigone Wells heard Ted Bridger say as he charged into her office.

“What’s up?” she asked, fumbling for the online feed.

“Just look!” he pointed to the crawler.

“… Federal government to adopt U.N. criteria in exchange for monetary support … OPEC votes to discontinue pricing oil in dollars, all transactions in euros … Dollar loses status as reserve currency amid flight to euros and yuan …”

“Interesting times, indeed,” she observed.

“You know, this could be a bonanza for us,” he said.

“It would—if any of our clients had money. But give me your thinking.”

“If those ‘Twenty-Nine Points’ get adopted as law, and land-use policies are officially redirected toward wilderness and sustainability, that will all but shut down commercial and agricultural development. We’ll see a lot more work under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. Then those new media and ‘cultural’ standards—whatever that’s supposed to mean—will bring us more First Amendment challenges.”

“Unless they just do away with the Constitution and Bill of Rights altogether.”

“The government can’t do that without, first, a supermajority of two-thirds in both houses of Congress, then ratification by three-quarters of the states.”

“Unless they just do away with Congress and the states.”

“Don’t be silly.” He grinned. “No one would do that!”

“Ted, I don’t know what anyone would do anymore.”

“Well, you may be right. But if this goes through, people won’t like it.”

“Yes, but will their indignation rise to the level of a lawsuit?”

“It will if new statutes hit them where they live.”

That night when Wells got home after her karate class, Jeanne Hale was watching the
10 O’Clock News,
which was serving up refinement and commentary on the day’s headlines about the U.N. demands and the crippling of the dollar.

“Did you
see
this?” the nurse asked.

“Yah. I’ve been hearing it all day.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Lot of high-level wrangling.”

“That’s all?” Hale asked.

“No effect on you or me.”

“How can you
say
that?”

“Well … how did you get here? Drive? No, and neither did I. We take the Muni bus or streetcar, sometimes a taxi, because it’s silly to own and park an automobile in this city. Do I live in a mansion? No, in an apartment carved out of the top floors of an old house that was built right after the ’06 fire. Do either of us eat that much meat? No, just a little chicken in the salad on Tuesday. We live about as sustainably as possible. What more could anyone ask?”

“Okay, I get it. But what about your contractor?”

“My
who?
” Wells asked, thoroughly mystified.

“Your fella who’s in the building trades, John Praxis.”

“He’s not a contractor. He runs a major engineering firm.”

“Okay, so he builds really big things. How’s that going?”

“And he’s not my ‘fella.’ Actually, he’s now my client.”

“Interesting development! So what does this U.N. stuff mean for him?”

“Even he doesn’t know. He says his firm might go under next week, but I seriously doubt that. They’ve got clients all over the world. Still, his workload’s fallen off. Not much call for new infrastructure. And all his clients have gone slow-pay, like the rest of us, so he’s in a bind. It seems dollars are scarce.” Wells thought for a moment about what she’d just said. “Dollars are supposed to be plentiful—not worth a whole lot though, but supposedly coming out of our ears—and yet they’re scarce. How’s that for trouble?”

“But still ‘no effect on thee or me’?”

“Well, not so much on us as the big folks.”

“You’ll be sorry to see your man lose his business.”

“He’s not ‘my man.’ In fact, he’s married.”

“What does that matter?” Hale asked.

“Not at all. I’m going to bed now.”

“Sweet dreams to you.”

“Shut up!”

* * *

Leonard Praxis was on the phone, planning his weekend getaway, when his brother came into the president’s office unannounced, closed the door behind him, and took a chair in front of the desk. Richard’s expression was, as usual, baleful.

“Call you back,” Leonard said into the mouthpiece and hung up.

“Do you know what Dad has done?” Richard said.

Leonard closed his eyes. “What is it this time?”

“He’s hired a lawyer on his personal account. And not just any lawyer, but the same woman who took us apart over that St. Brigid’s thing.”

“That’s damned insulting. Did you ask him? Did he say why?”

“He won’t tell,” Richard fumed. “Oh, he claims he has a reason. He says he met her in the hospital while he was recuperating. He says she was there recovering from a stroke—”

“I heard about that. Cheered me up for the whole day.”

“—and says she’s really a much nicer person when you get to know her.”

“Well, that’s certainly baloney. He’s up to something.”

“Yes, but what?” Richard said. “He’s top of the food chain in this company, both chairman and chief executive. He owns a third of the shares outright. And he has enough cronies on the board to swing any vote against us. So what does he need outside legal muscle for?”

“Maybe he’s just crazy,” Leonard said. “Some residual brain damage from the blackout during his heart attack. So now brain-damaged Dad meets brain-damaged lady lawyer, and they’re off to smash windmills and slay giants together. It could be harmless, like he said.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem mentally incompetent to me. He may be acting a little hyper about the money crisis, but it’s a
good
hyper, a creative reaction, even if I think he’s clutching at straws.”

“And he’s getting stronger, too. With all this jogging and exercise, he even
looks
younger. If this health kick holds, we may have to put up with him for years to come.”

“We can still gather votes against him. Force him to retire.”

“How? Callie is still throwing her shares behind him.”

“I think I may have an idea,” Richard said slowly.

“What is it? If there’s anything we can do—”

“Not now! You must not ask me about it.”

“Well, why ever not?” Leonard asked.

“Because you want deniability.”

* * *

While his son Richard, as chief financial officer, and Alison Crowder, PE&C’s head of Human Resources, discussed the company’s current situation and the savings to be realized by laying people off versus the expenses to be incurred in severance packages and government-mandated benefits support—with Richard shouting at this point, “
What
government?
What
mandate?”—John Praxis thought through everything he had recently been reading about corporations and their place in society.

They were meant to serve the economy, surely, by providing a product or service. They were also meant to serve shareholders—in this case, the Praxis family and those top-level executives they had rewarded over the years—by earning profits and investing in the business. But they also had a duty to their employees, those willing heads and hands who made the business into a “company,” what the dictionary called “an association of persons engaged in an enterprise, voyage, or military expedition.” As the credit crisis evolved, as their projects in hand either folded or went into suspension and the backlog collapsed, PE&C was being forced to jettison the very people who made it capable of providing a service and earning a profit.

The first to go had been the temporary workers brought on to fill gaps during the last expansion. Then, as each contract closed down, they had to send away the backbone of engineers, technical staff, and support services—long-time employees and familiar faces—who had fed directly off that project’s accounts. And now, in the discussion this morning, they were planning the decimation of division and department heads and the pool of senior engineers currently engaged in marketing. This was the nucleus of experts who, in the better times to come, might be expected to seed re-entry and growth in the various industries and sectors PE&C served. The national crisis had already eaten alive most of what he and his family had built over the generations. Now it was stealing their future.

The adage says a rising tide lifts all boats.
Praxis now realized that the reverse was not true.
An ebbing tide leaves some boats stranded higher up the beach than others, or stuck on shoals and sandbars, while the strongest, the best-managed, or the most maneuverable boats are able to navigate to safer waters.

Corporations which were still viable and could afford it—damn few, but not unheard of: Archer Daniels Midland, ExxonMobil, Safeway, and others necessary to prevent food riots—were actually stepping in and offering additional benefits for their key workers. They were providing premium-grade medical insurance to cover defaults in the various government insurance programs, mortgage and consumer loans where banks had refused to lend, and accelerated retirement funding to replace benefits lost from the now-insolvent Social Security system. This benevolence had the effect of increasing the tension between the haves and have-nots in society. If you had a job and long-term prospects that your employer could bank on, you might sail through the crisis with minimal discomfort. If not, you were suddenly back in the Stone Age with neither corporate paycheck nor government safety net. Of course, those who remained employed were also entering the Dark Ages of feudal serfdom, because who would dare quit a job that had become a lifeline?

Corporations which had their roots, their headquarters perspective, or a largish fraction of their business overseas—construction firms like Hochtief and Taisei, auto companies like Toyota and Honda, and pharmaceutical makers like Bayer and Roche—were circling the wagons against the U.S. government’s encroachments and pulling key functions and services out of the country. U.S.-headquartered corporations with large overseas holdings and markets were also preparing to move assets and expectations offshore.

Even states whose governments had good budget balances and relatively low tax profiles—those in the middle of the country, especially the plains and mountain states with heavy investments in the energy and extractive industries, and those in the economically rejuvenated south—offered better prospects for PE&C’s line of work. The company backlog was drying up fastest on the Coasts, in the Midwest, and the Northwest, where insolvency was growing, taxes were rising even faster, and public attitudes were closely aligned with the Twenty-Nine Points. These high-tax, high-spend states—California among them—had already begun the process of surrendering their sovereignty to the federal government and its U.N. backers, while at the same time they were demanding life-support from a partially refinanced Treasury Department.