by Ruth Ozeki
Ocean, on the other hand, just stared. “You hit him!” she said.
Poo tossed his macaroni onto the floor and started to cry.
Phoenix didn’t say a word. He just pushed away from the table and walked out the door.
“Wait!” Ocean cried. “I’m coming, too!” She leveled a furious gaze at me. “We hate you!” she said, and took off after her brother.
I sat there for a while, watching Poo wail and hurl his noodles as the cheese continued to harden on my older children’s plates, and then I went to the door. I saw them in the distance, walking down the road toward Cassie’s house. Phoenix had a stick, and he was whipping the ground with it. I phoned Cass.
“Just intercept them, will you? Maybe you can let them play computer games for a while. They’d probably feel a lot better if they could blow something up.”
“Sure thing, Yummy. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” I thought about that. It didn’t sound quite right. “Phoenix made a very mean crack, so I hit him.” A long silence followed. “I’ve never hit him before,” I added. There was more silence. I realized she could probably hear Poo, who was wailing behind me. “For God’s sake, Cass. I’m not like your father. I don’t beat my children as a matter of course. Phoenix was really rude. It just happened. Once.”
Finally she spoke. “I know.”
“I shouldn’t have. I feel terrible. I’m just exhausted is all. It’s no excuse.”
“Listen, I see them outside. I’ve got to go.”
I hung up and looked out into the garden. Momoko was standing by the fence looking down the road after the kids. She had stopped eating meals with us ever since Lloyd had gone to the hospital and the Seeds had been taken to jail. Instead she brought a small Tupperware container of food outside with her and ate it with chopsticks under the peach tree. I didn’t know what would happen to her when winter came.
Winter. The word felt like lead. I could not imagine another winter here. But nothing had changed. My father was in the hospital again, in Cardiology, right back where we started seven months ago, when I first came home to say good-bye.
By the time Cass came over with the kids, Momoko had gone to bed and I was sitting in Lloyd’s big armchair staring at the blank TV screen and drinking whiskey. The ashtray on the side table next to the armchair was full. Lloyd used to keep his reading glasses on that table, and a section of the evening paper. A letter opener and a cup of coffee.
The kids walked by me silently. Whiskey brave, I reached out and caught Phoenix’s sleeve. He tried to pull away, then let his arm go limp.
“I’m sorry, Phoenix. I was wrong to hit you.”
He ducked his head, which I took for an acknowledgment, and I hung on, hoping for more. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m sorry I said that stuff about you, too, all right?” I let go. I knew I was not going to get a hug this time.
Ocean watched. Her brother headed up the stairs, but she lingered. She was still a little kid, needing a full reconciliation with her mommy, so I held out my arms and she sidled into them. I wrapped her up, folded her in. She was such pure solace, and I blessed her silently, appreciating every last sweet bit of her while I still had access. Eventually I had to let her go, and she gave me a nice big smack on the lips and ran upstairs.
I turned to Cass. “Wanna drink?”
She shook her head, but I led her back into the kitchen anyway. The half-emptied whiskey bottle was sitting on the kitchen table. I topped up my glass and sat down.
“Well?” she asked.
I explained what had happened. “It’s Elliot. They blame him for everything—Lloyd’s heart attack, the Seeds’ arrest. He phoned the night of the action, just after I’d left with the ambulance. Phoenix answered. Called him a scumbag and a murderer.”
“Good for Phoenix. Did you ever call him back?”
“No,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I didn’t know about it until tonight. Apparently he’s called a couple of times, but the kids never told me. That’s what started this whole thing—he called again tonight during dinner. Phoenix answered the phone, and I heard him saying something like ‘Stay away from her or I’ll kill you, you motherfucker.’ I thought it must be those classmates of his, that maybe they were threatening Ocean, so I kept at him until he told me the whole story. I was sort of touched at his gallantry until he called me a whore.”
I expected Cass to rise to my defense, but she just sat there, lips pursed, frowning and eyeing the level of my whiskey. I raised my glass in a toast to her.
“So are you going to call him?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think I should?”
“No. You know, he came by our house after the action to talk Will into pressing charges against the Seeds. I had a chance to look at him for the first time since . . . well, you know. He’s a liar, Yummy, but it’s worse than that, because he doesn’t even know he’s lying. He manipulates people. He was using you to get information about the Seeds. Now he’s trying to use us. I just hate seeing Will fall for it, but he doesn’t know any better. You do.”
I felt my face go hot, and I took another swig. The disgust in her voice unnerved me. “Of course I know better,” I said haughtily. “I’m just curious to hear what he has to say for himself, that’s all. And while we’re at it, what about Geek? I mean, talk about manipulating us!”
Cass shook her head. “At least Geek has an honest belief. I don’t see Elliot believing in much of anything, except maybe himself.”
“Maybe that’s true, but at least Elliot’s not turning my kids into young anarchists.”
“No,” Cass said. “You’re doing a fine job of that all by yourself.” She stood up, took the whiskey bottle from the table, and put it away on the top shelf of the cabinet.
“Hey . . .” I said. “Give me that!”
She turned around and glared. “You know what, Yummy? Sometimes I think you don’t deserve those kids of yours. Sometimes I just want to snatch them away.”
I glared back at her. I don’t know how long we would have stayed there, glaring at each other like that, but just then the phone rang. We’d been talking in a hush, trying to keep our voices quiet, and now the ringer on the old wall phone made such a clamor that we both jumped, and somehow this struck us as funny.
“What if it’s Elliot?” I whispered. “I don’t want to talk to him now! You answer.”
“I don’t want to talk to him!”
“Quick before it rings again and wakes everybody up. It might be the hospital about Lloyd. Please, Cassie!”
So she picked up the receiver. “Fuller residence,” she said. She listened for a while, then made a face at me. “Just a minute. I’ll see.”
She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s some woman journalist,” she said. “Jill something or other. From Washington, D.C.”
kali, the destroyer
She had four arms and three eyes, and her tongue was snakelike and red. In one left hand she held a bloody scimitar, and in the other a severed head, but both her right hands were extended, palms up, as though offering benedictions. Around her neck she wore a garland strung with more human heads, and the belt that encircled her waist looked like a grass hula skirt made of hundreds of dangling arms, dismembered at the shoulder. Her skin was blue. She stood on the chest of a supine white man.
“Kali,” Duncan said. “Goddess of Destruction. Quite something, isn’t she?”
Elliot shuddered. He folded up the wrapping paper that had contained the small statuette. “Thank you, Duncan.”
Duncan laughed. “I can tell you’re not quite sure about her. I can read it in your eyes.”
“No . . .” Elliot started to protest, and then he looked at her again. “Well, she is a bit terrifying, you have to admit.”
Duncan leaned back in his oversize leather chair. “To the Western mind, hopelessly caught in the dualities of illusion, she would appear to be so. But Kali transcends paradox. She represents death and birth, because one cannot
exist without the other. She represents the destruction of the ego, the liberation from the concerns that bind us to this plane of life and keep us from reaching enlightenment. She is violence, and she is compassion. Sybaritic and nurturing, cruel and benign, kind mother and vengeful whore . . .”
Sensing a shift in his employer’s tone, Elliot looked up from the severed head.
Duncan was contemplating him. “Speaking of which, I got a call from Legal, Rhodes. About that friend of yours. Jillian. She’s turning up with disturbing frequency in the oddest places. Legal ran a check on her and got the confirmation today. She’s doing a piece on strategic litigation. Unearthed every SLAPP that Cynaco’s got going.”
“What?”
Duncan nodded. “Part of a series on corporate imaging. She’s featuring the seed copyright infringement lawsuits that Cynaco has pending against farmers, as well as some rather confidential details from the Proactive Management Strategy.”
“She got hold of the PMS?”
“Apparently.” Next to the pantheon of gods on Duncan’s vast desktop was a single folder, which he now drew in front of him. “She’s leading off with your Idaho Potato Party and the subsequent case against the Seeds of Resistance. Which, let me remind you, I went along with as a means of proactive neutralization of a hostile cell, and you assured me the press would see it that way. But this?” He opened the folder and held up a batch of clippings, then started to read: “ ‘Potato Party Protesters Liberate Cynaco Spuds.’ ‘NuLife Grower Powerless in Power County.’ ‘Farmer says, This Spud’s a Dud.’ ” He replaced the clippings in the folder.
Elliot spoke up quickly. “I’m not worried about any of that,” he said, looking Duncan straight in the eye and flapping his hand. “Those are just a few local papers. By the time this goes national, we’ll have the whole thing turned around. The farmer I told you about is bringing the suit, and he’s going to play even better than I thought. Salt of the earth, humble, and injured. We’ve got the church people out there in full force, picketing in front of the courthouse every day. We’ve got the Potato Promotions—”
But Duncan shook his head. “No, Elliot. You’re not hearing me. Your friend Jillian has taken this to a whole different level.”
He reached out his hand for the Kali statue, and Elliot passed it to him. He turned it over in his palm. “She is all women, all nature, the dark secret of the Universe.” He pointed to the supine man, under her feet. “This is Shiva, by the way. Kali’s consort. You know why he’s lying here? To placate her. Story goes that she went on a killing spree, got drunk on all the blood and power, and started destroying everything in sight. To calm her, Shiva lay down and let her dance on top of him. It worked. Put an end to her rampage.”
He handed back the statue. “The Hindu pantheon has some truly remarkable lessons, Elliot.”
By the time Jillian returned his call, three days later, the first of her series of articles had run. He had attempted to get the piece quashed, but she’d gotten to his other contacts at the paper first, so that when he called, he could sense their bemused smiles over the phone as they assured him they would do what they could do. Of course they didn’t. As a former journalist and fallen member of their ranks, Elliot knew that any further persistence on his part would only confirm the truth of her assertions and make the situation worse.
What he needed was leverage. He couldn’t go back to Duncan yet. Idaho was bad, and Delhi was worse, but there were still other possibilities that made Elliot wince. “Oh, Elliot, we’re having a little image problem with that pipeline up in Umiat, Alaska.” So instead he waited.
The article astonished him. It was entitled, “The Idaho Potato Party: A New American Revolution?” and it focused on the lawsuit brought by Will, Cynaco, and the state of Idaho against the Seeds of Resistance. She had described in detail the Independence Day action in the potato field, and in the process she had dug up everything else: Cynaco’s use of private investigators to spy on farmers and infiltrate activist groups, lawsuits against farmers charging them with patent and copyright infringement for planting unlicensed seeds, and libel cases against activists and reporters for criticizing food and agricultural products.
She had spelled out the meaning of SLAPP—Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation—and delicately lambasted Cynaco and other corporations for using the American justice system as a censorship tool to undermine the First Amendment and to squash criticism of their products and practices.
Somehow she’d even managed to imply that Lloyd Fuller’s heart attack was caused by Cynaco’s harassment.
It was a compelling, if somewhat audacious, piece of investigative journalism, and there was a time when Elliot might have felt proud of her spunk. He didn’t know she had it in her. Though, on second thought, maybe she didn’t. Maybe her spunk was simply rage at him, for being such a prickless little fuck. At least that’s what he surmised, talking to her on the phone when she finally called him back.
The ringing woke him from a deep, dreamless sleep. The machine picked up.
“Wake up, Elliot, if you want to talk to me.”
He grabbed the receiver. “Aw, Jillie . . .” he groaned, rolling over. “Why’d you have to go and write that?”
“It’s my job. Let’s just say I got real interested in the thoroughness with which certain PR operatives infiltrate their sources.”
“Huh?”
“You used to fuck her, Elliot.”
He choked. “Excuse me?”
“Yummy Fuller. I always knew you were a dick, Elliot, but she was fourteen years old! You were her goddamned history teacher!”
Elliot sank back against the pillows and closed his eyes. Her voice had the effect of a wood rasp on the soft tissue of his brain. He didn’t know that he could feel pain there. He held the receiver away from his ear, let it rest on the pillow beside him. Her voice was tinny now.
“And twenty-five years later you screw her some more? What were you thinking?”
He pondered her question but couldn’t come up with an answer. He picked up the receiver again and put it to his ear.
“Why’d you do it, Jillie?”
He heard her sigh. “You really don’t get it, do you? At first I was just curious. I wanted to find out why you were so preoccupied with Liberty Falls. But after talking to her—”
“To Yummy?”
She paused. “How could you have sex with someone named Yummy?”
“That’s not her real name.”
“Whatever. Yes. I talked to her. She wasn’t terribly helpful, but her son certainly was. As was Cass Quinn, and the local sheriff, and the lawyer representing the Seeds of Resistance, who are languishing in jail. And after hearing about the way you treated all of them, I just decided to fuck you. Interpenetration, Elliot. For the way you screwed us all.”
“For chrissakes, Jillie,” he said huffily, starting to defend himself. “I didn’t screw anybody.” But then he remembered Shiva and backed down. “At least I didn’t mean to. Was I so bad? I thought we had a good time. I thought that’s what you wanted—”
“What I wanted! ”
So much for placating. He held the receiver away again, shrinking from her rampage.
“I’m thirty-four years old, Elliot! I’m not part of your free-love generation, remember? That was just a lousy exploitative concept you hippie dickheads came up with to get fourteen-year-old chicks into bed.”
No, he thought mournfully. You don’t understand. It wasn’t just that. Free love was so wonderful. So . . . free.
“Love is not free, Elliot. It costs. And you’re just a fucking stingy bastard who’s too cheap to pay.”
He tried Yummy later that day. As usual, the kid answered.
“I told you to stay away from my mother, you scumbag!”
He sighed. He was really beginning to hate the telephone. He stared at the statue of Kali that sat on the far edge of his cluttered desktop. “Don’t talk to me that way,” he said listlessly.
&nb
sp; He heard the click of an extension picking up, then, finally, Yummy’s voice.
“Phoenix, get off the phone, please.”
“It’s a wrong number, Mom.”
Elliot broke in. “Yummy, it’s me.”
“I know,” she said. He heard the sound of a receiver clatter to the floor, followed by the boy’s footsteps.
“Just a moment,” she said, then muffled the phone. He waited, straining to hear what she said to her rude brat of a son, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She sounded very composed.
“Hi.” He sounded less so. His heart was pounding. He tried for levity. “Your secretary does a good job screening your calls. I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”
“He’s very protective.” She paused. “I haven’t been home much.”
“Yes, I gather.” He paused, listening to the silence that was opening between them. Now that he finally had her on the line, he couldn’t think of what to say. He scanned the heaps of paper and junk on his desk, looking for a clue. He wasn’t even sure why he was calling, except that she was one more urgent item on an urgent list of things to do, calls to make, business yet unfinished, crises ready to break.
He knew he had lots of things to tell her.
“So?” she asked.
“I’m sorry about your father,” he said weakly.
“He’s not dead yet.”
“It must be hard.”
Another long silence, and then she spoke. “Yes. There’s no one left here to help.”
“I’ve been trying to call. Did your son give you any of the messages?”
“I heard.”
“I don’t think Phoenix likes me much.”
“No. He sort of picked up on the general Elliot-bashing vibe. He blames you.”
