Out of Time

by David Klass

  But as she ran, Ellen saw a face—a young, handsome, and determined face that swam to her out of the deep pool of suppressed memory. He had a shy but winning smile and was wearing a Yale baseball cap cocked to one side, a green T-shirt, and jeans. She heard his deep and strident voice giving an eloquent speech condemning federally sanctioned logging in national forests. She saw his brilliant and sexy hazel eyes looking back at her. She felt his strong arms around her, his soft, inquiring lips on her own. Ellen blinked away the sense memories and sped up.

  No, he was long gone. Dead and buried. She had delivered the eulogy at his funeral and broken down in tears near the end. Ellen sprinted, her elbows pumping like pistons, driving away the ghost as she hurtled forward across 137th Street with such a fierce burst that a turning car nearly hit her and a man shouted out the window, “Watch where you’re fucking going!”

  The Green Center was housed in a five-story brownstone that had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. When they had found it, it was a total wreck and scheduled for demolition, but with the help of their hedge-fund donor, they had renovated it from the studs up, and now it was glorious.

  Wanda buzzed her in, and then Ellen was standing on the polished oak floor where it was toasty warm. A fire crackled in the large fireplace, and the smoky warmth was infused with the smell of sage incense and Yogi tea that someone was brewing in the snack room. There was an unapologetic hippy-dippy sensibility to the Center that gave it a relaxed and homey vibe, but on this Tuesday morning, the mood was anything but relaxed—Ellen was immediately surrounded by the excited chaos of an environmental hub on a red-letter day for Mother Earth.

  Richard was pacing in the hallway, doing an interview with the mainstream press, shouting into his cell phone that of course he was sorry about the loss of life at the dam but what really mattered was what Green Man himself had cited—the moral imperative to act before it was too late. “We are in a pitched battle to save our Earth, and the only way to win that battle entails the destruction of property and, yes, tragically, a few casualties. Don’t you have kids of your own? You’re damn right I’m making it personal. All he’s trying to do is give your kids a chance to live out their eighty years on a sustainable planet, just like the one that your parents bequeathed to you.”

  Josie—who ran their neighborhood outreach programs—had gathered several young employees around her desk, where an artist’s imagined rendering of Green Man stared out at them from her computer screen. Greenpeace—realizing the importance of his face as a rallying point and no doubt also for fund-raising—had put this “portrait” on its main page. They did not justify his actions, but they were showing the world a very human face. It made Green Man look powerful but also gentle, like a cross between Christ and a young Bob Dylan.

  “Whatta you think?” Josie called out as Ellen walked by. “They’re raking in the big bucks. We need a sexy image, too.”

  “That’s not Green Man for me,” Ellen replied. “She’s younger, black, and buff.”

  “I think Green Man or Green Lady is sexier without a face,” a tall researcher said. “Leave it up to the imagination.”

  “No way. His eyes are dreamy in that picture,” a young Latina intern with a nose ring commented. “That’s what I check out first. The soul is always in the eyes.”

  “This isn’t eHarmony,” Ellen told them all. “We’re going to gather in the conference room in five. Make sure everybody’s there.”

  She climbed the stairs to the second-floor offices and hurried down the long corridor, her fast footsteps thudding off the floorboards.

  Louis was in his office, door wide-open, reading something on his cell with his stockinged feet propped on his desk. His big toe poked up through one of the old socks. He waved as Ellen passed. He’d been an environmental activist for nearly five decades, and his scraggly white beard and kind eyes made him look like a cross between John Muir and Santa Claus. There were two treasured photos in his office—one of him in his twenties at the first Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia in 1970 near a bunch of icons, including Edmund Muskie, Ralph Nader, and Allen Ginsberg. In the second photo, Rachel Carson was presenting him with an autographed first edition of Silent Spring, which now sat in a hallowed spot on a shelf behind his desk.

  “They haven’t caught him yet?” Ellen asked, seeing his concentration on his cell phone. She didn’t need to try to keep the worry out of her voice—no one at the Center wanted Green Man caught.

  “Nope. They’ve shut down most of Idaho, but he’s long gone.”

  “And let me guess—our contributions are up?”

  “Superheroes are great for fund-raising,” Louis told her gleefully. “Folks are throwing money at us. There’s a video of the dam collapsing on YouTube that’s been viewed three million times, and I think each time someone views it, they send us five dollars. He’s Green Man, we’re the Green Center—maybe they think there’s some connection. But hey, if it’s green, we’ll take it. We’re gonna have a kick-ass budget.”

  “We’re all meeting downstairs in five. Whatcha reading?”

  Louis held up the cell so that she could see photos of dams. “The Sierra Club’s got a great new piece up on the Snake River controversy. It starts with the Swan Falls Dam going up in 1901 and then describes the other fourteen going up, and the one that just came down. It explains how they damaged the salmon runs, and all the legal challenges. There’s no way they could have cooked it up this morning—they must have had it in press and gotten lucky. Or maybe Green Man tipped them off where he was going to strike,” Louis suggested with a sly smile.

  “I’m sure the FBI will be checking into that possibility,” Ellen told him, and went into her corner office. She quickly changed from her track shoes and sweats into comfortable jeans, a wool sweater, and loafers. Behind her locked office door, she checked the breaking news. Green Man’s letter about the Boon Dam was the most-read thing on the Internet, and he was still free and clear. Ellen paused on her way out and steeled herself—she knew she had a fight ahead of her.

  More than forty of the Center’s staff were waiting for her in the main conference room, from the most junior eighteen-year-old intern, who was battling an acne attack, to their elegant octogenarian receptionist, Wanda Webster, who walked in slowly, leaning heavily on her mahogany cane.

  “Hey, everybody,” Ellen said. “At ease.” It was a running joke—they were always completely at ease, sipping kombucha, slumped into window seats, splayed languidly on beanbag chairs while Wanda gently glided back and forth near the bay window on an old rocker. “By now all of you have seen that Green Man struck again last night, blowing up a dam in Idaho. Apparently he’s gotten away with it.”

  There was applause and an enthusiastic chant of “Go, Green Man, go.” Ellen let it go on for several seconds and finally held up a hand for silence. “Okay, that’s what we’re here to talk about. On a personal level, I don’t entirely disagree with that reaction,” she admitted.

  “But?” Richard called out, sensing where this was going.

  “But,” Ellen said to him—and then she glanced from face to friendly face. She had known many of them for decades. “While you have the right to your feelings as individuals, we’ve reached the point where we need to respond to what’s happening as an organization—we can’t remain silent any longer. After all, we share a name with him.” Ellen asked herself for the hundredth time, Out of all the catchy environmental nicknames in the world, why did the national press have to pick Green Man?

  “Greenpeace is just as ‘green’ as we are, and they’ve made him their poster boy,” Josie pointed out. “And by the way, their contributions are up three hundred percent.”

  “I’ve never compared us to other organizations,” Ellen answered. “And we’re not in this for the money. I founded the Center to go our own way and make our own choices, and that’s how I’ve tried to steer us as your director. And my who
le life has been a repudiation of violence.”

  “What about the violence against the ozone layer?” Richard shouted. “The murder of the coral reefs? The rape of the rain forests?”

  There was a buzz of agreement in the large room. “That is definitely a kind of violence—” Ellen began to answer.

  “You’re damn right it is!” Richard shouted over her. “It’s a war, and we’re losing it. And I’m not just talking about rain forests and reefs, but fuck, what’s this really about? Our future.” His voice rang with fury. “I’ve only got thirty more years left, so I’ll probably check out in time. But there are young people in this room who are going to have to deal in their lifetimes with an irreparably damaged and ultimately doomed planet, and I pity you. And still we elect presidents who deny climate change, and billionaire Secretaries of the Interior are appointed who support their obscene lifestyles by doing the will of rapacious corporations and gutting every protection we’ve fought so hard for. That bastard Ellmore deserved what he got.”

  Ellen tried to rein him in. “Richard . . .”

  But the short man with the goatee had a full head of steam up, and people in the room were nodding. “Ellen, we’re not only losing the war, but it’s almost too late. Finally someone stands up and says, ‘Enough. There’s still time. Let’s save it while we can.’ And he has the brains and the nerve to strike back and inspire a generation, and now we’re going to condemn him for fighting for everything we believe in?”

  Ellen let Richard’s angry question and the clapping that followed his speech fade to silence. When she spoke, it was in a soft but very clear voice. “I’ve always admired your passion, Richard, but I heard you out, and now it’s your turn to listen to me. I grew up as a poor black girl in Tennessee, the daughter of a single mom who cleaned rich white people’s homes and had every reason to be bitter. She’d marched with Martin Luther King and cried the night he was killed, and she brought me up to believe in him, and we sat together and read everything he’d written the way some of my friends and their parents studied scripture.”

  Ellen paused and remembered how exhausted her mom had looked trudging home after a fifteen-hour day. “Twenty years after the Memphis march, my mother was still scrubbing the toilets of rich white people and we were skimping by on food stamps. When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a very different civil rights hero—one who the boulevard a hundred yards from here is named after. I sat up nights watching his old speeches online. He was sexy and passionate, and most important, he had been ready to fight back. His call to action struck me as the right path. If Martin Luther King had had a dream, then he must have been sleeping, and when I was sixteen, Malcolm X seemed wide awake and saying just what I needed to hear.”

  Ellen paused and saw several of the young interns, from widely different backgrounds, watching her closely. “Action now. Take the fight to them. So I went to Berkeley to be in Bobby Seale and Huey Newton territory, and I found my own cause, and I did some things in college I’m not proud of now. I was there when Earth First! knocked nails into trees so that if loggers tried to cut them down, their chainsaws would bounce off and cut off their arms. And I raised my fist and shook it with justified anger. And it sure felt good.”

  Ellen focused for a second on the dignified face of Wanda Webster, who was rocking back and forth in front of the window. “My mother died when I was in grad school, and it was only after she was gone that I slowly realized she had been right all along. I read Thoreau and Gandhi, and I slowly came to understand that nonviolent resistance is not only the most moral but also by far the most effective response—for both the civil rights movement in the sixties and for the environmental battles we’re fighting now, literally today.”

  Ellen locked eyes with Richard across the conference room. “You’re absolutely right, Richard—we are in a desperate war to save our planet. We’ve lost some major battles, but we have science on our side. We have the youth on our side. But most importantly, we own the moral high ground. And that’s why we’ll win, just the way Gandhi won and Martin Luther King won. But we can’t give up that high ground. Violence is always wrong. Bombs and bullets are not the way to effect change. Killing innocent people is murder, and it’s absolutely unjustifiable.”

  Richard started to object. “William Ellmore was hardly fucking innocent—”

  But this time Ellen spoke over him. “When Secretary Ellmore’s yacht went down, his five-year-old granddaughter went down with it. That’s child murder, plain and simple. We cannot endorse or condone someone who is doing these things. And it’s immoral for us, as an organization, to profit from them by tacitly approving and remaining silent. We will no longer do that, as long as I’m the director here. I’ve consulted with the board about this. We’re going to be one of the first environmental organizations to responsibly speak out against Green Man. If you disagree, go to the board and make your case—maybe they’ll fire me.”

  “So you want Green Man caught?” Richard demanded furiously.

  “No, I don’t want him caught. But I want him to stop,” Ellen said. “That’s my position, and that will be the position of our Center effective immediately. Green Man should cease and desist. He’s struck six times, and there’s no denying that he’s accomplished a lot without harming the environment in any of his attacks. He’s galvanized the Green movement at home and abroad. He’s explained his justification eloquently in his letters. He’s generated a national debate on the imperative to act, and he’s inspired the youth to become active. He’s helped good people raise lots of money for deserving causes. He’s called attention to different significant threats to the global environment. If he stops now, he’ll forever be a controversial hero who accomplished important goals. If he keeps going, he’ll destroy everything that he’s done. Because do you know what will happen, as sure as I’m standing here?”

  And now she had them—and it had always been one of her gifts—because she was able to plug into something very real, and that was her own true fear that Green Man would be caught. “If he keeps going, they’ll find him. No matter how clever he is, no matter how careful he is, they’ll track him down. And then they’ll put him on trial, warts and all. It will be like a Roman triumph when the FBI leads him on a perp-walk in shackles. Do you want to see that? I don’t want to see it.”

  Wanda stopped rocking. Louis had been knitting, but his needles were still on his lap. They were all watching her, because there was deep passion in her voice that more than matched Richard’s seething anger from a few minutes earlier. “Do you want to know that Superman is actually meek reporter Clark Kent? That Batman is really a rich and spoiled tycoon with a butler? That the Unabomber was just a bearded weirdo living in a cabin in the woods? And who is Green Man? Do you want him exposed as a weak and flawed human being—as weak and seriously flawed as you are and I am? If you really admire Green Man, join me and this organization in condemning his methods—not his goals—and urging him to stop now. Because the legend he has created is far more powerful than anything he can do with one or two more bombs. Let him be forever who he is right now, a legend, a mystery, a call to action, but not a man.”

  She stopped talking then and studied their faces. There was no applause, but some of them looked convinced, or at least thoughtful. Richard and several of the younger staff who were under his wing looked pissed off. “I know some of you have very strong feelings about this, so I’m going to give you a chance to talk it over without me present,” Ellen told them. “Thank you all for hearing me out. I think you know how much I love this place and how I respect all of you.”

  She walked back up to her office. She locked the door and checked the news. The national manhunt was continuing, which meant that Green Man was still free and clear. She looked up what was most trending on the Internet. His letter about the Boon Dam had been viewed and retweeted more than fifteen million times and had become a global sensation. Countries around the world, from
France to China, were increasing security at their major dams.

  Ellen felt such a powerful jolt of pride and fear that she had to press down on her desk with both palms to steady herself. She almost cried, but she was able to mask her powerful real emotions as she had so many times before. She remembered the moment two nights earlier when she had hurried up to a desolate mailbox in midtown, near the Port Authority, braving the cold, drizzle, and roaring winds, and dropped in the letter addressed to a news editor of the New York Times, her right hand shaking in the black glove that Green Man had told her to wear and then burn.

  SEVEN

  Tom followed a petite Asian morgue attendant in a white lab coat into the viewing area. She led him to a small, windowless office with two wooden chairs arranged by a desk. The only thing on the desk was a clipboard lying facedown.

  She shut the door and said in a soft voice, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Smith. Let me tell you exactly what you’re going to see. We do next-of-kin identity verifications almost exclusively by photograph these days. The photo of the decedent is on that clipboard. When you turn the clipboard over, you’ll just see his face, and I have to warn you that since he died in an auto accident, there was significant trauma. But his features are identifiable, and you should be able to recognize your loved one. Do you have any questions?”

  “No,” Tom said. There was a dull roaring in his ears, as if he were near the sea.

  “Do you want me to stay here with you, or would you prefer to view the photo alone?”

  “Give me a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll be right outside,” she said. She stepped out through the door and pulled it closed.

  The walls were white and bare, and there was a single square-shaped fluorescent light on the ceiling. So it comes down to this, was all Tom could think. After a quarter century of trying to find a way to love or at least be close to his father, it came down to this windowless little cell of a room and this four-by-six photo. He reached down and turned over the clipboard.