Authors: Jane Smiley
He heard the bench scrape the floor; then there was a pause. A siren came and went in the distance. Henry shifted in his chair and licked his lips. He should have asked her to refill his water glass. He reached for the Kleenex, and the music began again, those simple notes at the beginning, then the chords, which always seemed so promising and patient, maybe the best opening measures of any music he knew of. That was when the pain came, a sharp but short pain. Henry writhed, clenched his fist, then relaxed, opened his mouth for a little air. The music swelled. Da da da da.
—
IF FELICITY AND EZRA
had been getting along better, they might have uncovered who was behind Piddinghoe Investments more quickly, but every time they got together, at least in person (Felicity was
not
moving to D.C. and Ezra was
not
moving to Boston), they would argue, not about the election (they agreed that the election was a bald-faced power grab by the Corporatocracy), but about an organization called Deep Green Resistance. Ezra hadn’t joined DGR, and how did you join? There were no dues or meetings. But he was infected (Felicity’s word) by DGR’s manifesto, and the infection caused argument outbreaks. It also festered in Felicity’s brain, giving her migraine headaches. Even at Uncle Henry’s funeral, they’d had a vicious whispering argument in the living room, when Ezra pointed his finger at the light switch as if to shoot it. Felicity knew that her least developed talent was a sense of humor, but still could not help herself.
The theory propounded on the Deep Green Resistance Web site and in books by the DGR founders was that the only way to save a modicum of civilization was to systematically destroy the energy infrastructure right now, and maybe right now was too late; 2013 might not have been too late, but the world had dithered itself into four more years of climate collapse. Felicity’s problem with these ideas was that she could see the logic of them—if the world were forced to go local by the destruction of airports, roads, oil and gas pipelines, transmission towers, banks, harbors, the Internet, then, yes, there would be a war, or many wars, but the population would decrease, and the humans who were left would be forced to live the best they could in the environments they found themselves in. Abstractly, Felicity
understood the necessity for population collapse of humans in order that other species might have the ghost of a chance, but she thought Ezra skated around the deaths of millions, and seemed to imagine that the items of infrastructure to be destroyed (including windfarms) would be manned only by jerks and assholes who deserved to die. Had there not been a day care in the building that the Oklahoma bombers blew up in ’95? Well, yes, said Ezra, but…And then he would spout the perfectly logical argument against non- or partial resistance put out by DGR: As energy supplies diminish and get dirtier, one society after another is going to be taken over by ruthless dictators, determined to preserve privilege. The entire world is going to turn into Haiti or Pakistan, and not only will more people die in the end, more overall destruction will be wrought, so that the planet will not be able to recover. The boil of civilization had to be lanced
right now
. Of course, Ezra didn’t even have a gun, much less a store of fertilizer, and he didn’t kill flies or spiders—he always wanted to see what they would do, so he followed them around his apartment and then opened a window and shooed them out. Felicity considered herself the cold one—the coldest one. Her first thought when her parents lost the farm was “About time.” Hadn’t she told her dad to switch to organics in 2013? The market was there, and the links between conventional farming, obesity, starvation, and habitat destruction were unequivocal. But how could he afford to take the land out of production for the three years it would take to clear out the chemicals (maybe more)? The farm bill didn’t pay for that.
Her second thought was “Why am I crying?”
Nevertheless, they did uncover the primary shareholders in Piddinghoe Investments, and right at the top of the list was Michael Langdon.
—
ANDY KNEW IT
all along, simply by the ebb and flow of money into her account. She kept track. On May 1, there were three deposits right in a row; on May 6, three more; and so on, all through May. As fast as she could, she sent it away—to school districts all over New Jersey and New York, to the New York Public Library, and to all the disaster-relief organizations she could find: floods in Maryland, Norfolk, England, and Denmark; hurricanes in Mexico, the Florida
Keys, and Texas; earthquakes in Russia, India, and Italy; drought relief in Arkansas and Oklahoma; research into enterovirus D68. When Richie told her that the farm had been sold to Cargill for fifteen thousand an acre, about thirteen and a half million dollars, she had pretended to be shocked, but she hadn’t been. However, she had stayed up all night writing checks. She kept no records, gave little thought to the IRS—that little thought being, Come and get me, I am ninety-six years old. Her own accounts were down, though, so at the end of May she sold her best item, a Dior gown from 1957 that she had worn to some Upjohn gala for the New York City Ballet. It was cream-colored, with beading at the tiny waist and a silk band that wrapped around the shoulders, highlighting the face, the upswept hairdo, and, as she remembered, the sapphire necklace she had borrowed from Frances Upjohn. It was a beautiful piece, it still fit, and she sold it for forty-six thousand, throwing in the white calfskin elbow-length gloves for free. Michael hadn’t called her in a year, but he did send smoked salmon, champagne, and chocolates for Mother’s Day.
—
MICHAEL WAS ELUSIVE
, indeed. No more dropping by Richie’s condo with bags of take-out, no more laughing with Jessica in the kitchen, no more unsolicited advice about how to get his act together. Their last real conversation had been about the election. Michael’s theory was that the Supreme Court had acted wisely—the right was much better armed than the left, so, although deciding for the Republicans had led to roiling protests, they were relatively peaceful. Deciding for the Dems would have triggered a disaster, “if you consider disunion a disaster,” which Michael did, at the moment. Then he shrugged, as, Richie had thought, a man with a flat in the Greenwich Peninsula development in the southeast of London might do. A nearby spot was called “Isle of Dogs,” which did give Richie a laugh. But as far as Richie knew, Michael still owned the Shoebox. No “For Sale” sign, and the furniture was still there (Richie peeped in the windows). He did not think that he, Richie, was being actively avoided; he thought Michael was back in business, but it was a new sort of business, more adventurous and piratelike, no longer based in having a respectable domestic establishment on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan. As soon as Ezra told Richie that Michael had somehow foreclosed on the farm and kicked Jesse and Jen out, it all clicked into place without Richie’s even pondering it—first and foremost, that look of rage every time Michael talked about inheriting only a hundred grand from the old man and then finding out that the portion of the farm that Jesse got was worth six times that, then the intermittent teeth-grinding references to Jesse he had made over the years, that the “kid” (Jesse was two years younger than they were) was making all kinds of mistakes, as if Michael knew the first thing about farming. That time—say, two or three years ago—when Felicity mentioned at the table that her dad had refused to try organics, Michael had actually blown his stack and gone on at length about the free market, and if the free market was on the side of Whole Foods, well, so be it—he had no more allegiance to Monsanto than he did to Pan American World Airways. It was the same with feminism, with nuclear power, with solar, with anti-virus vaccines. The truest gauge of the way forward was the free market. Jessica had said, “But the free market is always so late to the game, isn’t it?” and Michael had laughed out loud.
At first, the theft of the farm (for that’s what it was) didn’t bother Richie all that much. But he kept thinking about it. Jesse and Jen had moved in with her brother; he was helping with the farm work, she was looking for a job. They could end up anywhere. The thing Richie wanted most was to hear Michael’s side of it—not some slogan about “what’s done is done” but the details, what he thought when he was pretending to be broke, how he got off scot-free from the forgery, why it all happened, how he fucking felt now, whether he had been lying about every single thing—but Michael was nowhere to be found. Their mom hadn’t heard from him in over a year. Janet sometimes mentioned Chance, since he and Emily were good friends, but Richie couldn’t imagine Michael showing up at the ranch and having some tender father-son moment with the cowboy. Frankly, if Michael had ever felt anything for Chance, Richie thought, Loretta had put a stop to it, claimed him for her own until her mom took him away.
It went this way through the summer, into September, into October. Everyone was distracted by the Pakistan/India skirmish, but the president did what Richie thought he should do—he sat on his hands
until the Chinese premier, Ji Ling, who was younger than Richie by twenty years, stepped in and told both the Pakistanis and the Indians that China would do the retaliating if a single atomic weapon was deployed, even by accident, since prevailing winds over Beijing were from the west. After the Chinese had disarmed Iran in December, they became the de-facto peacemaker of the world, but peace was getting harder and harder to make; even Richie could see that (they hadn’t disarmed the United States, had they, and Vice-President Cotton was still arguing for war).
Of course, Michael showed up at 2:00 a.m. Of course, he was banging on the door to the condo; of course, Richie jumped out of bed, his heart pounding, and ran out to quash the noise. He closed the bedroom door. Jessica was still asleep.
Michael was happy, bouncy, and cheerful. Drunk? High? Not evidently. Flat-bellied and in good shape, neatly bearded—Richie noticed even as he invited him in that the white pattern in his beard was quite similar to Richie’s own.
What he wanted to talk about was not the farm; he had forgotten about the farm. Fact was, he was getting married again. Richie hadn’t even known that he and Loretta were divorced, and were they? Unlikely, Richie thought. When Richie said, “Why did you bother with the fucking farm?” Michael looked blank, genuinely blank, then said, “Shit! That was a sweet deal. Cargill and ADM were falling over each other trying to get that place.”
Richie said, “Do you know what an asshole you are? I’ve always wondered.”
“Do
you
know that land is a commodity, just like anything else? What do you care? It isn’t your farm. You never cared about it. I don’t believe you care now.”
Richie ignored this and said, “I know you did something underhanded.” He hadn’t known this a moment ago, but now the conviction flooded him. “Or illegal.”
Michael shrugged.
Assent.
Michael said, “I did not go looking for the fucking farm.”
“Actually, you did go there. I found out. Why did you go there?”
“Oh Jesus, Richie, I was in the neighborhood anyway. Look, irrigation is a thing of the past. The world population is eight billion.
If we don’t have a vertically integrated food-production system, our kids are done for. There’s about three spots left on the planet—well, of course I’m exaggerating—where the food is going to grow, almost, but not quite, no matter what. Why should a bunch of guys go out every February and scratch their heads and say, ‘Wale, what’m Ah gonna do this ye-ah?’ ”
Richie clenched his fists. He could feel the back of his neck heating up. He said, “That isn’t Jesse. Jesse isn’t a rube, never was. He knows more about farming than you.”
“Well, so what? However smart he is, he isn’t equipped to do economies of scale. It’s no big deal. I, we, bought two bundles of mortgages from that bank. They weren’t the only ones, that wasn’t the only bank, and I am not the only investor. I was scrolling through the list, and there he was.” He shrugged again. Then he put his hand on his shoulder and cracked his neck and moved his jaw left, then right. There was something about this set of movements that told Richie that Michael was sure he would get away with it.
He said, “You foreclosed even though he had made all the payments.”
Michael said, “It’s been done before.”
“Remember that time at the farm? You were screaming about subsidies and how you, as a taxpayer, shouldn’t have to subsidize incompetence or stupidity, or whatever you—” Richie felt his back teeth grind together.
Michael smiled his old smile, the sly one. He didn’t need his own lobbyist in Congress, or his own bought-and-paid-for flack on the SEC; all he needed was chaos, and there was plenty of that to go around. The smile was still there, the smile that said, “You don’t care, really. Your loyalty is to me, really. I know it and you know it.”
Richie stared at Michael, then faked a yawn. After a few beats of silence, he said, “Who are you marrying?”
“Do you remember Lynne? She came to your wedding.” Michael smiled again.
“The decorator? Your mistress who was just daring Loretta to ask her why she was there?”
“Repurposer. Those days, it was lofts, but she’s done all sorts of things. She likes to find architectural gems from certain periods, mostly modernist, and put them back together. She’s done three
Frank Lloyd Wrights. With the flat roofs and all the windows, they tend to deteriorate.” He palmed his iPhone and handed it to Richie. Plain woman, glasses, gray hair, practical look. No resemblance to any model or movie star ever. Richie stood up and said, “Get the fuck out.” He handed back the phone; then, softening, he made it sound like a bit of a joke: “It’s three o’clock in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”
“Fuck, yeah!” said Michael. But he hoisted himself out of the sofa, grabbed his jacket, and left, not forgetting to yank the door open so hard that it hit the wall and knocked into a framed photograph of Jessica and her brother and sister on the day Jessica graduated from high school, gowned in white that reflected in her face, her hair in a shiny bowl cut. Michael thumped down the stairs.