by Tod Goldberg
“Nobody,” Tania says. “No one at all.”
Tania has never liked heights and yet here she is on the observation deck of the Stratosphere, nearly one hundred stories above the Las Vegas Strip, her twelve-year-old adopted daughter beside her, staring out through the bowed Plexiglas window at the street below. The day has turned overcast and muggy, and from her vantage point in the sky, Tania can see heat lightning snapping between the clouds clustering to the west over Interstate 15, though the sun still cuts through the clouds intermittently. From up here the world is so tiny and unmovable to Tania; like it is under water. Everything looks wet and gray and yellow as if the clouds are bleeding the fluorescent lights off the Strip, floating between what is real and what is imaginary. Even the air seems distant and colored. Tania thinks she could jump and just float and float.
An announcement rings out over the loudspeaker that the next batch of riders for the rollercoaster should make their way to the elevator to shoot up the remaining five stories to the very top of the tower, where they will spin upside down, where they will corkscrew through the air, where no one will pay any attention that there’s a woman coming to realize that the only mistake she has made was waiting so long to start this phase of her life, was being so selfish, so stupid to think that she could just pick up in the middle, that she could replace her own empty life with this other person.
Natalya is already walking toward the elevator when a strange sense of vertigo strikes Tania and she grabs at the metal railing in front of her, as if it can stop the sudden perception that she is seeing too much, that somehow the world has flipped over and she’s no longer someone’s daughter at all; that she’s a woman, that she’s responsible, that life is starting now, that everything else has been mere prelude.
“Natalya,” she says, and the girl stops, turns around, looks at her. Tania would like to believe that there is some recognition in her daughter’s eyes, that the girl sees in Tania the same thing that Tania feels. That she does love her. That she will never love her. That she thinks she already knows Natalya completely, because that poor girl is her, was her, could be her, wishes she was her. That she doesn’t know her in the least. That she will spend her lifetime looking for Natalya’s parents, dead or alive, if that’s what the girl wants. Or she will never mention them again. She will never mention them again, because Natalya will not need them.
That she doesn’t know if she’ll ever know her enough.
Tania could let Natalya go up that elevator to the top of the Stratosphere by herself, and by the time the rollercoaster ride was up, she could be back in her Explorer and heading out of town for good, could disappear into another life. It’s a thought she has had over and over again since they arrived back in Las Vegas. It’s a thought she knows makes her unstable, unfit to be a parent, unlikely to give Natalya any kind of life at all.
“Are you scared?” Natalya asks.
“Yes,” Tania says.
Natalya walks back and takes Tania by the hand and pulls her along toward the elevator, pulling her past the couple in the matching Circus Circus T-shirts, past the men in tight pants with shiny silver rodeo buckles on their belts, past the teenagers with pierced eyebrows, past the old man and old woman with fanny packs and into the elevator where they stand pressed against the back wall of the car. As a child, Tania’s father used to take her and her sister to Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane to ride the attractions left over from the 1974 World’s Fair, but what she recalls now is that he never went on any of the rides. He’d stand outside the Tilt-a-Whirl, or the Spider, or the Bumper Cars and he’d just watch, so that whenever Tania got scared (which was often), she always knew she could find him standing there, already looking directly at her, always ready to meet her gaze. Perhaps it was out of fear. Perhaps it was out of love, even a love born out of simple duty. But it was perpetual.
The elevator doors close and Tania becomes aware of how close she is to Natalya, how she can feel her daughter’s pulse through the grasp of her fingers, can smell her perfume and her shampoo and something indistinct that reminds her of being seven. And in that brief moment when the car shoots upward and the world turns buoyant, all that Tania finally perceives is the weight of her daughter’s hand in her own, and she decides she will force herself to remember this moment, that she will hold it as precious, even if she’s not sure now if it means anything at all.
Rainmaker
Professor William Cooperman hated teaching in the summer. The information was always the same no matter the season, of course, but for Cooperman it was more about the students. If you were taking Introduction to Hydrology in the middle of July, that meant you’d spent the entire year avoiding it, or had failed it in the fall and only now were thinking that maybe you’d spend a few weeks getting the F off your record, maybe earn yourself a D and be done with it. That was the problem with students today. No one ever thought that understanding how water worked on the planet was vital, never even paused to consider how something as simple as sprinklers had changed the course of human development, or that it was eventually all going to turn to shit in this world and water would be a commodity you’d kill for; no compunction whatsoever.
No, he thought, sitting behind his narrow desk at the front of the lecture hall, his thirty-five students midway through the fifth pop quiz he’d proffered to them in just two weeks, these students today just didn’t want to fail water. His students couldn’t see beyond the moment, couldn’t understand that the ripples they were causing would eventually be tsunamis. Didn’t matter if it was water or gasoline or not caring about their bodies, kids today just didn’t grasp the enormity of the predicament.
Kids. That was the other thing. Cooperman was only forty, still felt pretty much like a kid himself, like he could just as easily be sitting on the other side of the desk. He’d sit in the third row, next to Katie Williard. She seemed nice, and everyone in the class sort of gravitated around her during breaks, not only because she always had Altoids, which was true, but also to ask questions or to see if she wanted to study with them. She wasn’t pretty, at least not in the classic sense, was actually sort of fat and not in that Freshman Fifteen kind of way, but rather as if she’d always battle with her weight. If she had kids, man, forget it, she’d be huge, but Cooperman thought that if she just sort of lived her life normally, didn’t bother to procreate, she’d be . . . stout. He frankly liked that in a woman, if only because it told him she actually was a human being who might eat a cheeseburger every now and then.
He checked his watch. It was 2:13. Cal State Fullerton required him to hold class until precisely 2:30 each day, so that the students would get the exact amount of contact hours they needed, lest some state accreditation auditor pulling undercover duty in the class was just waiting to pounce on the college for skirting the rules. And then he had another section at 7:00, which meant his whole day was lost. Cooperman thought all of them at the college were a bunch of fucking Communists as it was, but this slavish dedication to time didn’t jibe with his thoughts on higher education, which is perhaps why he was just an adjunct professor. The way Cooperman figured it, education shouldn’t keep a clock. If it took five minutes to teach something, what was the use of sitting around for another hour talking about it? Especially in the summer. And on a Thursday, everyone’s last day of class? It was useless, so the pop quizzes were his way of getting around that issue of talking, of actually fielding questions. Invariably someone would finish the quiz before 2:30, but the social Darwinism at play in the lecture hall essentially forced them to stay seated until a reasonable point, which was usually about 2:15.
But for some reason the students were spending more and more time on the tests, as if they were actually thinking about each question, and the result was that class was not only going the prescribed length, sometimes it went over, and that just wasn’t going to work today.
Cooperman had a business meeting at the Sonic over on Lemon at 2:45 and really couldn’t afford to be late. The guy he did business with, Bo
ngo Fuentes, wasn’t real big on excuses and apologies. He said he wanted to meet at 2:45 at some crap-ass drive-in fast food restaurant and you got there at 2:50? Might as well not show up at all. It occurred to Cooperman that working in academia and working in the illegal drug trade weren’t all that different: people expected a certain level of punctuality, which, when you thought about it, was a really bent business model. If any two fields demanded fluidity, it was academia and drug trafficking.
The professor stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, and when that didn’t elicit any response, he said, “Pencils down,” and then the entire room came to a full stop. It never ceased to surprise Cooperman how conditioned students were. He could have taken a shit on his desk and no one would have even looked up, but utter those two words together and it was holy sacrament. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling too well. Today, everyone gets an A on their exam. Just be sure your name is on your Blue Book when you pass it in.”
There was a slight murmur in the class and immediately Cooperman knew it meant bad news. Normally, a professor says “everyone gets an A” and no one bothers to ask for any kind of explanation, but Cooperman had set a poor precedent on Monday. He’d asked everyone to turn in a two-page essay on what they perceived to be the most fascinating aspects of hydrology and then accidentally left the whole lot of them in the trunk of his rental Ford Focus, which wouldn’t have been a huge problem had he not torched the rental in Mexico after it became clear he had to lose that car and lose it fast after a regrettable shooting incident. After making up a suitable lie (“I’m afraid I left all of your essays at an important conference in El Paso this past weekend.”), he gave them all Bs on their papers, which caused a tribal war to break out between the Good Students, the Katie Williards of the world, and the Back Row of Fucktards, like those three frat guys whose names he intentionally didn’t learn, since he was pretty sure he’d separately seen each of them purchase weed from Bongo sometime in the last year.
Predictably, Katie raised her hand.
“ Yes, Ms. Williard?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cooperman, but I’d like to finish my exam and get the grade I earn. I think most of us feel this way.”
He liked it when she called him Dr. Cooperman. And though he wasn’t a PhD, he didn’t bother to correct her. A little bit of respect went a long way in Cooperman’s book. All these other kids? Half of them didn’t even address him at all. Worse was the preponderance of adult students who’d found their way into the college after getting shit-canned from their jobs at the post office or were bounced from the police force and now found themselves in GE level courses with a bunch of kids; those students always thought they should be able to call him Will or, worse, Bill. He blamed the geology professor, James Kochel, for that particular slight, since Kochel let all of the students call him Jim or Jimmy, said it was the pedagogical difference between teaching and fostering and he preferred to foster.
Katie, she had a little class. A respect for authority. He kept thinking that he should Google her name from home to see if she kept a blog, see if maybe she was harboring a small crush on him. Who could blame her?
“ Yes, Katie, I understand,” he said. He liked the way her name sounded in his mouth. It helped that it was also his ex-wife’s name, though that was just coincidence, he was sure. “That makes perfect sense. So why don’t we do this. Everyone, take your quizzes home with you. Complete them at your leisure and bring them back, and all of you will get the grade you’ve earned.”
That was enough for the Back Row of Fucktards, which meant it would be enough for the Good Students, since all the Good Students really wanted in life was to be like the Back Row of Fucktards, the kinds of people who managed to pass their classes without any mental exertion at all. The whole school was filled with future middle managers anyway, Cooperman thought. It really was no use being like Katie Williard. Ten years from now, someone from the Back Row of Fucktards would be her boss regardless.
Cooperman felt absurd pulling up to the Sonic in his white-on-white Escalade, but it was important to convey a positive image while doing business. It was the rap music he had to blast out of his speakers that really bothered him, particularly now that it was 2:44 and there was no sign of his business associate, which made the fact that there was a middle-aged white guy dressed like a professor sitting by himself listening to The Game all the more obvious.
It was all that bitch and ho shit he couldn’t stand—he’d grown up on LL Cool J and Run-DMC, even liked Public Enemy despite their anti-Semitism and Farrakhan crap, always sort of thought Chuck D had his head wired for revolution, could have been like Martin Luther King Jr. if he hadn’t been saddled with that clown Flava Flav. The big joke was all that drug hustling rap music. They even had a media class at Fullerton on the subject; it was called Street Documentary: The Socio-Economic Impact of Rap Music, and every semester kids lined up to get in, as if that class would ever save the goddamned world from itself.
Anyway, he only listened to gangsta rap now so that he could figure out what the hell people were saying to him, both in class and on the streets, and so guys like Bongo Fuentes, who was now officially late for their appointment, wouldn’t think he was a complete asshole.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Fresh out of graduate school, Cooperman got a top-shelf research job working for Rain Dove, the sprinkler industry equivalent of being drafted in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys. Within a year he was the big dog in the Research & Development department, but by his fifth year on the job he was thinking about even bigger possibilities. The sprinkler industry had always been about making the world green, about giving customers the impression that no matter where they happened to live, they were in lush surroundings; that their backyard could look like the eighteenth hole at Augusta if only they purchased the latest automatic sprinkler system. It was a successful model—one only had to visit Rain Dove’s corporate offices in the middle of the Sonoran Desert of Phoenix for tangible proof.
Nevertheless, Cooperman saw the future one night while watching a Steven Seagal movie, the one were Seagal plays an eco-warrior who, after breaking fifty wrists over the course of a two-hour period, makes an impassioned speech to save the world from the disasters of human consumption. As far as epiphanies went, Cooperman recognized that this was one he’d probably have to keep to himself, but what he realized while watching Seagal pontificate was that change was coming—that if even marginal action heroes were taking time out of their gore-fests to admonish the very people they entertained to conserve, hell, it was only a matter of time before the offices of Rain Dove would be picketed by some fringe water-conservation terrorist cell or, worse, Seagal himself. Better to be ahead of the curve than be the curve itself.
He spent the next two years developing new technology that would actually limit the need for the expansive sprinkler systems Rain Dove was famous for. He migrated Doppler technology into existing systems to measure air moisture and barometric pressure, developed a probe that would constantly measure soil dampness, linked it all to a master program that calculated exact field capacity reports which would then decide, without any human interaction whatsoever, when exactly the sprinklers needed to go on. Or if they ever needed to go on.
And that was the rub. Test market after test market determined that most people who were buying Rain Dove systems actually lived in places that needed absolutely no irrigation at all. Grass would grow and die in precisely the manner it had since the beginning of time, with or without a system, and specifically without Cooperman’s vaunted RD-2001.
At the time, he had a huge house in the Sunny Hills neighborhood of Fullerton (the locals called it Pill Hill because of all the doctors who took up residence there); he and his now-ex, Katie, were talking about having kids (which meant he’d have to cut down on his weed smoking, since their doctor said it was lowering his sperm count to dangerous levels) and seriously considering a little condo in Maui. Still, he always had the strange sense that he was living in the o
pening shot of a Spielberg movie, right before the aliens showed up to turn the bucolic to shit.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, then, a week after the last test market showed everyone just how cataclysmic the RD-2001 would be to the sprinkler industry, to find himself out of a job. But that was his problem. He was like one of his goddamned students, never thinking about ramifications, never watching the ripples, even when his own fear system kept setting off alarms.
A month later, he was out of a wife.
A year, he was living in his parents’ house in Buena Park and making pro–con lists about his life, trying to figure the relative value of killing himself.
Two years and he was using the RD-2001 technology to grow some of the most powerful weed in the universe.
Three years, he was supplying.
Cooperman checked his watch again. It was now 2:55 and The Game was pledging allegiance to the Bloods though suggesting even Crips could enjoy his rhymes. Where the fuck was Bongo? In the years they’d been doing business, Bongo had never been late for anything; in fact, Cooperman couldn’t remember showing up to a meeting and not finding Bongo already impatiently shifting from foot to foot like a five-year-old needing to piss. Back in the day, when Cooperman just bought weed for his own consumption, Bongo was his connect. Now they were essentially partners, though he never really got the sense that Bongo liked him. They didn’t have much in common, of course, apart from the weed, but they’d made each other a lot of money, and because of that they often shared moments of happiness together, which Cooperman thought gave their relationship a unique value.
At 3:00, Cooperman’s cell phone rang, the opening strains of “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” replacing his preferred rotary dial ring tone. It was one of those songs that he thought would make him sound authentic if anyone he needed to impress happened to be nearby when the phone rang, but that was never the case. No one ever called William Cooperman because he usually didn’t give anyone his number. Still, when he looked at the display screen and saw Bongo’s digits he felt inordinately relieved.
