In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  The sun was by now leaving its post, but its setting was overshadowed by black-lined cumulonimbus. In every sewer grate we passed: high water smelling of gasoline. Rain began to fall, fat slugs of water warm as though fired from a gun. We ducked into a Burger King and waited out the storm among teenagers, abuelas in floral nightgowns, and the old Cubanasos whose ball caps were perched tip-top like cockscombs. Outside, the rain lashed the boughs of a tall ceiba tree; the Santeria offerings cradled in its roots remained dry.

  Not long after it had started, the rain stopped, allowing lurid nighttime to descend. The puddles paved our final miles in neon. The sulfide lamps lining our approach into Downtown Miami could barely vault the night, and the yellow they threw off was thin, salty, and seemingly ready to go out, like flare light. “What are we going to do with ourselves when we wake up and don’t have any forward momentum?” Glenn asked. There was more than a little solemnity in his voice.

  We wandered through Miami’s ever-expanding skyline in pursuit of Bayfront Park. Over here: the thickset SunTrust building, where I worked in the mail room during college breaks. There: the Metromover, a glass van that rolls on donut tires along an elevated track. Hovering above like puppeteers’ hands: so many construction cranes. Idle for the moment, they’d soon be back to supplying the demand for Miami’s record-setting condo boom. Some 230 condominiums are currently under construction, and their thirty thousand new units are more than any other U.S. city’s. Moving into these luxury boxes will be more brokers and financiers, impresarios and dignitaries. Trailing them like sharks behind a shrimp boat will be the hustlers and shysters who come to scam the world-industrial con men. The circuit is rather beautiful in its symmetry. It ensures that metropolitan Miami leads or comes close to leading the nation in every conceivable form of white-collar crime, from mortgage fraud to Medicare fraud, income tax fraud to insurance fraud, identity theft, loan fraud—shall we just say fraud. Miami is the fraud nexus of the Western Hemisphere.

  But let us not overlook our industry-leading creativity in other fields: fake lotteries, telemarketing scams, sham marriages, seafood double-dealing, unlicensed butt implants.

  KENT

  Miami is so false, cruel, and beautiful, man. The concept of due diligence is nigh on inconceivable. It’s like we had it decreed: Never shall there be anything written, built, or said in the direction of “Wouldn’t you like to reconsider?”

  Miami excites the imagination. But more than that, Miami excites avarice. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that while the Cubans were reshaping Miami, it was the drug dealers who were financing the skyscrapers, yachts, luxury malls, and Lamborghinis. Miami was reconstructed with their flight capital. It was sold and resold depending on the street price of cocaine, the exchange rates in Central America, who was in power where. Consider the six years between 1977 and 1983: Miami went from having zero foreign banks to having more than 130. At that time, my father, a feeder fish in the real estate ecosystem, was paid for services rendered with cash-stuffed duffels. He bought our house at auction off a jailed “importer/exporter.” My high school’s prom king was the son of the actor who played Rico Tubbs on Miami Vice. One of my neighborhood pals lived under an assumed identity because his father was a Noriega coke lieutenant who’d snitched. (“Blanco” being maybe not the choicest of pseudonymous surnames in his case.) Two of my best friends growing up had been coke dealers, and an even higher percentage of my less intimate friends were involved in the trade. Everyone was, as they say, getting well.

  Drug money, transfer payments, life savings. Condominiums, vacation rentals, retirement homes. This is the sloshing liquidity on which Miami floats. Even in their most hallucinatory fever dreams, the conquistadores never could have imagined it. Five centuries after their first Florida missteps, there’s finally a Spanish-speaking metropolis here, a true world capital shimmering like a mirage between the swamp and the breakers. And how stranger-than-fiction is it that the whole enterprise still runs on convincing others to bring and invest and squander the wealth they made elsewhere?

  Before fording the narrow Miami River, Glenn, Noah, and I had to ford a brand-new, billion-dollar, semienclosed plaza of luxury retail, office space, and private apartments known as Brickell City Centre. Conceived during the real estate bubble of the mid-aughts, abandoned during the subsequent crash, revived in 2012, constructed right next to the goddamned water, and opened just the other month as if no, no this is not a metaphor for anything, City Centre was packed with visitors. They were entering two and two unto this ark of late capitalism via escalators from the street.

  There’s a question near the end of Homer’s Odyssey that gets me every time. After having yearned for home for two decades, Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca. But he’s been away so long that he can’t believe his lying eyes. “And tell me this,” Odysseus says, “I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?” That’s how I was feeling. In my youth, the Greater Downtown area was nowhere you wanted to be after dark. Come the end of the workday, cars streamed out of bank offices and law firms like ants abandoning the colony. This, now—it’s truly home?

  “Mmuh,” Glenn said, suckling from the tentacle of his hydration pack while simultaneously staring into his phone. He spat out the hose, let it drop to his side. “It’s built by a Hong Kong outfit,” he said.

  We skedaddled before security could round on us. As we crested the drawbridge over the Miami River, I looked back at the shoppers and tourists swarming the mall—so many in, so few out—and I thought again of ants. Ants entering a liquid trap and getting mired to death in the stuff they’d come to take home with them.

  NOAH (O.S.)

  Is that from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you undergrad slap dick?

  I sigh.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Say something about how, like, the storm is obviously coming for this place. But even so, for you to be wringing your hands and quoting NASA reports about sea-level rise here—it’d be a jeremiad for no one.

  KENT

  Something something disbelief, unreality. Willing self-deception.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Winner winner.

  I take a few moments to think.

  Beneath the din of stalled traffic, the incoming tide is splashing against pilings. The resulting sound is a lip-smacking one, like that of an aficionado who has tasted the wine and is anticipating the rest of the bottle.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  There’s a story about how, right before Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992, these exotic animal dealers, their new stormproof warehouse wasn’t ready, so they rented an old greenhouse and loaded it with their latest shipment of spiders and frogs and snakes and plants. Then Andrew blew the greenhouse off the earth, and the creatures fell with the rain. It’s probably not entirely true. But it serves as a decent creation myth in terms of how Miami came to be populated by so many invasive species. Brown tree snakes, Asian carp, Burmese pythons. The giant African land snail most recently. These species get here, they find Florida to be a lively surrogate with niches they can fill. They join the competition. And they thrive.

  PASSING MOTORIST

  Get a car! ¡Carajo!

  KENT (CONT’D)

  Of all Florida’s invasive species, the most successful has been optimism. Ineradicable optimism. It has taken over like a fast-growing strangling vine. Not hope, mind you, but optimism.

  The optimist believes in progress. To him, the past is nothing but a record of inferiority, both moral and technical. No sense sifting those ashes. Anyway, the optimist says, the steady accumulation of scientific discovery and ethical betterment means I am on the spear tip of history.

  Because of his belief in progress, the optimist does not make intelligent use of the past. He practices a kind of deliberate forgetting. How can history repeat itself if the future is
always a straight shot forward? And since he doesn’t really give a hey about how he got here—and since the world to come can’t help but be better than this one—the optimist has no desire to make provisions for the future. Why would he? If everything is continually getting better and smarter and more perfect, then whatever problems we face now will surely pose no challenge to those strange and superlative tomorrow people?

  Hope, on the other hand, does not require that you treat history as though its stages were drop-away boosters to be jettisoned on our upshot to the moon. Hope sees a continuity between past, passing, and to come. As such, hope perpetuates its name, its origin, its glory, its virtues. Because more than anything, hope is a belief in justice. Past wrongs will be righted. The wicked will be punished. Suffering is not endured in vain.

  Hope, then, requires a trust—a faith, you could say—that comes across as absurd to those who don’t share in it. Those who do share in it? Maybe things will get better, probably they won’t—in the end, what we trust in is the fullness of time.

  * * *

  —

  We footed into Bayfront Park, a beautifully manicured greenspace where a man once tried to murder FDR. (He missed and killed Chicago’s mayor instead.) When I was a kid, Bayfront Park was still considered an ideal place to get shot. This night, though—young professionals jogged and businesspeople strolled about shaping ice cream cones with their tongues. The three of us were very much out of place. We wanted to do anything but go straight to where we were.

  We reached the waterside railing. Beyond it was Dodge Island, where one kind of freight is unloaded at the Port of Miami and another is loaded at the Carnival cruise terminal. Beyond that: Miami Beach, and the deep blue sea.

  KENT

  Carl Fisher, you know—the first thing he prohibited after he’d summoned Miami Beach out of the water? Cemeteries. Cemeteries wouldn’t be allowed on his island. No lie.

  —

  FADE IN:

  INT. BASEMENT OFFICE—AFTERNOON

  Behind his desk in a subterranean, cinder-block cell at the University of Miami sits DR. HAROLD WANLESS, a slumped elderly man whose droopy mustache is the color of wastewater. The chair of the Department of Geological Sciences, WANLESS speaks like a man who understands the future all too well—which is to say, he speaks in a flat, Eeyoreish monotone. Wanless has been giving this same interview to government officials and newspaper reporters for decades at this point.

  WANLESS

  It’s nice that you three still talk to one another.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Yes, well. It’s been something. The walk has definitely been some thing. But, Dr. Wanless—you’re known as the Paul Revere of sea-level rise. Is that fair to say?

  WANLESS

  It’s hilarious. Sort of sadly hilarious.

  Wanless removes his glasses, rubs the bridge of his nose.

  WANLESS (CONT’D)

  Can I explain what global warming is?

  KENT

  (half-joking)

  As quickly as possible.

  WANLESS

  As quickly as…OK. Only 7 percent of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere. Do you know where the other 93 percent lives? Of all the heat that’s been produced by the extra greenhouse gases we’ve put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or maybe before—93 percent of that heat has been transferred to the oceans. So, global warming is really heating up the oceans. The warming atmosphere is for centuries going to continue to warm the oceans. That’s now what’s starting to melt ice. And once that sinks in, you realize we’re screwed.

  Wanless delved into his practiced presentation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century, he said. The Army Corps of Engineers projects as much as five feet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration thinks up to six and a half feet. According to Wanless, however, all these worst-case scenarios are too conservative; they don’t account for how exponential the glacier and ice-sheet melt will be in the decades to come. Wanless described it as being like a positive feedback loop: Water on the melting ice surface absorbs more heat, accelerating surface melt. Meltwater then percolates through the ice, resulting in more extensive fracturing. Still more warmed water seeps into these fractures, softening the ice and further accelerating melt. Round and round she goes, faster and faster.

  WANLESS

  We’re just seeing the beginning of what we know becomes a rapid ice disintegration. We’ve really kicked over the bucket, as far as something that we really didn’t want to mess with. It’s not something that’s if we behave, it’s going to go away. We’re in for it. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the greenhouse gases will keep warming the atmosphere for at least another thirty years.

  Wanless points to a JAR OF WATER on a shelf.

  WANLESS (CONT’D)

  This used to be ice in Greenland. There’s more where this came from.

  KENT

  (hastily)

  And what does this mean for the state of Florida?

  WANLESS

  At six feet, more than half of Miami will be submerged. Miami Beach will be gone. Miami, as we know it today, is doomed. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.

  Miami is second only to Guangzhou in terms of world cities most imperiled by rising seas, Wanless droned on. Be that as it may, no help is forthcoming from the state and federal governments. And, anyhow, Miamians are still building like there’s no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Forget levees or dikes. What works for New Orleans and the Netherlands can’t work here, because the underlying limestone and sand substrate is too porous, too permeable. Water will come from the east, yes, and west from the Everglades, too—but the big problem is that it will burble underfoot at the same time.

  As little as twelve inches of rise will bring salt water into the aquifer that sustains 5.5 million South Floridians. It’ll also wreak havoc on the sewage system that keeps this megalopolis somewhat sanitary. Insurance and mortgage rates will shoot through the roof. People will stop coming; the ones who are already here will try (and likely fail) to sell their properties before cutting and running. Tax bases will plummet. There won’t be enough money to fund infrastructural upgrades, to say nothing of the salaries of police officers, garbage collectors, and firefighters. And that’s before the rising sea reaches the core of the Turkey Point nuclear plant twenty-four miles south of Miami.

  Bye-bye, tourists. Adios, flight capital.

  WANLESS

  This is the kind of Ponzi scheme you’d want to invest in. This is a sure thing. In the maps we have of Miami-Dade County, the elevation maps—there’s about 44 percent of the land left after a six-foot rise in sea level. But three-quarters of what looks like dry land is less than two feet above the new sea level. So we’re really down to like 11 percent of what we started with that is habitable in any sense of the word. And then if you go on up to 10 feet, which is where we’re headed and beyond—it’s less than 10 percent.

  I perked up.

  KENT

  Can we see those maps?

  Wanless brings up satellite images and computer projections. One shows that at four feet of rise, Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, and Virginia Key will be swamped. Wanless clicks over to six feet, and the Keys are gone.

  KENT

  (pointing)

  Huh. It looks like northwest Miami is actually going to be fine.

  WANLESS

  Yeah, there’s some nasty business going on there with developers coming in and talking inner-city people into selling cheap. Because the inner city, a lot of that is up on the higher ground.

  KENT

  I…see.

  Whil
e Wanless answered Noah’s question about increased mosquito populations and the threat of disease, I used my phone to search out properties for sale in the northwest region of the city. The way I figured it, we could slip the family some cash, get them to go along with a scene in which we appear to hornswoggle them out of future beachfront property. Gold, I thought. And, hey—maybe their price would be reasonable?

  WANLESS

  We’re on our way. This isn’t just a trivial little experiment humankind tried. Mine the coal. Suck the oil out. It’s a massive effort. And it’s been very successful, unfortunately. We won’t give up our comforts now. We won’t go back to hunting whales for lamp oil. We’ll be controlling our climate by the end of this century, I’m sure. But. That’s not going to change rising sea level. That’s not going to change aridification. To undo the sea change…I believe that’s out of our grasp. Just massive. And let’s put it this way: It’s out of our grasp to undo it right. We always try to engineer things, and they always end up causing horrible side effects that we didn’t anticipate.

  Wanless shrugs, palms up.

  WANLESS (CONT’D)

  This is what humans have done to themselves. This is what we have done to ourselves. Some of us believe we see it clearly enough that we have a responsibility to share it.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Speaking of abdicating moral responsibility—what do you make of the recent political developments as they pertain to climate change?

  WANLESS

  I certainly hope that Donald Trump is going to understand the seriousness of this. He, uh, maybe he can do a few other things like…we do have too many regulations and things. Drives people crazy. We’ve had Democrats and Republicans, and they haven’t really done a lot. What they have done, they did as decrees. Which the next president can undo. It’s time we get a leader that’s willing to…to gut these things. Maybe overgut them, so they can be rebuilt as needed.