Freebird

by John Raymond

  As for the true ambitions that flooded him on a daily basis, those were so extravagant, they could barely be thought, let alone spoken aloud. Sunporches and Mexican road trips were only the beginning of the fantasy. His dreams ran to radiant glory and blinding, obscene fame, a life ruined by fame. He wanted, when he really got down to the true desire running in his veins, a life that could be called revolutionary. There, he’d said it, at least to himself. A revolutionary life. Was that too much to ask? To be a song by the Clash. To be a song by Neil Young. He wanted to be the song “Powderfinger,” a living being of infinite soul and beauty in his mind. And how disappointing it would be if he failed to wreak this havoc on the world, if he failed to change the course of human thought.

  By the time he came back to his grandpa’s lounging area, his mind had cooled, though he was no closer to figuring out what he planned to do.

  “Okay, Grandpa,” he said, tossing the last of his paper towels in the garbage can. “I’m heading out now. I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

  “Oh, you don’t need to come tomorrow, sweetheart,” his grandpa said from his sarcophagal chair. The TV cops were sneaking through a basement with raking flashlights, but the suspense level was low. There would be no bodies discovered in this room, anyone could tell.

  “No, no,” Aaron said. “I’ll be here.”

  “I won’t be here, though,” his grandpa said.

  “Oh?” Aaron said. “Why not?”

  “I’m going out of town.”

  Aaron frowned. His mom hadn’t mentioned anything about travel plans.

  “I didn’t know you had any plans this week,” he said gently.

  “I’m going to Oakland.”

  “But . . . how?”

  “In the car,” his grandpa said, as if that were obvious. He was fingering the remote, preparing for his coming hours of glorious TV. So many cops were behind the screen, preparing to entertain him.

  “How long will you be gone?” Aaron said. He was no longer sure if this was real or fantasy.

  “Not very long,” his grandpa said. “I only have to get something. All that talking we did, it made me remember.”

  “What do you have to get?”

  “Something at the bank.”

  “You can call the bank. I can help you if you want.”

  “No, no, for this I have to go there. This isn’t something for doing over the phone.”

  “What is it you have to get?”

  “My gold,” his grandpa said. “I think it’s time to bring it down here. Before I can’t anymore. Before I forget.”

  “Are you serious?” Aaron couldn’t believe he was serious. Or could he? He wasn’t sure. Gold?

  “Oh yes.”

  Aaron watched his grandpa lying in his recliner, the top of his head with its spots and greasy patches under the thatching. Aaron was skeptical of the mission but also curious. Could this be true? Did it matter?

  “What time do you want to go?” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

  7

  There were so many red flags flying on Mark Harris, it was hard to know which one was the reddest. The mere choice of the Beverly Hills sushi restaurant he’d insisted upon for lunch was a red flag, with its lacquered bar, its gigantic, pretentious displays of birds of paradise and calla lilies, its intimidating, canted mirrors, and the coup de grâce, the glass bathroom stalls with the doors that frosted when they locked, an electrical charge somehow turning the clear panes opaque. Pure flypaper for the crass, rich, and insecure, Anne thought, stepping from the chamomile-scented chamber.

  When Mark himself had appeared, the flags had raised and snapped stiffly in the wind, practically flying off his every article of clothing: his trendily plaid oxford shirt, still creased from the package, flagrantly open around the neck; his absurd, crosshatched designer jeans (Why does anyone ever wear anything but Levi’s? she wondered; men should know this by now); his grotesque sport shoes, multicolored piles of scientific webbing and buttresses upon buttresses, with those silly aerated soles. Every single sartorial choice was dubious, if not some kind of crime against decency.

  And under the clothes, still more flags—his fatless body, superfit from what he’d let slip was his near-professional Argentinian martial arts regimen; his sharply defined jaw, framing fine, symmetrical features that had never once known struggle or despair; his porcelain hands, if porcelain were soft. The entirety of his clean, pink skin that smelled delicately, spicily, of aftershave.

  All in all, Mark Harris was the very embodiment of the guys Anne had been fighting against her entire life. She’d fought them in high school, strutting around in their Top-Siders and madras shorts, taking bong hits and extolling the virtues of Ronald Reagan; she’d fought them in college, stumbling on the fraternity steps in their grass skirts and sombreros; she fought them daily in the office, killing time in their fantasy basketball pools, succeeding wildly beyond their efforts or intelligence simply because they understood each other so well, having consumed all the same albums and movies and TV shows at all the same junctures in their pampered lives. She’d spent her whole life hating these guys, these unapologetic winners in life, almost none of whom had any idea the fight was even on, having never been forced to recognize their own grotesque privilege and dumb luck, let alone account for it.

  She’d googled him, of course. He’d started out rich, no surprise. His fortune had been handed down from his banker father, and, to Mark’s credit, he’d amassed another fortune on top of that one. Real estate was his game, and in particular green real estate, whatever that meant; it seemed like an oxymoron to her. He’d developed a prime tract of riverside brownfields in Portland, erecting a pod of mirrored silos for aging baby boomers within yards of the major medical-research hospital. After that bonanza, he’d developed a sustainable convention center, the first passively heated structure of its gargantuan size in the nation. From there he’d graduated to “green stadiums,” less an oxymoron than an outright hypocrisy in her book, mostly on the grounds of state universities, inciting controversies over the ecological footprints and rumored sweetheart deals with resource-gobbling sports programs. He was now, at age forty-seven, as rich as humanly possible, splitting time between a few cherry-picked projects at his design agency, his martial arts, and his winery.

  Yes, Mark Harris was the enemy, the epitome of the entitled capitalist overlord. So why, then, did she find herself liking him so much? Sitting across the table from him, staring at the Oakley sport glasses pushed back on his blond head, the manicured, professorial beard on his toned, ruddy cheeks, knowing full well the history of sickening injustice that had spawned him, she found herself strangely amused. Why? He was not amazingly intelligent; he wasn’t a good listener; he had horrible taste. But he was funny. And, even more than that, he was funny in a particular way that she was helpless against: he was a pervert.

  “Wontons,” he said, peering at the menu. “I think I’ll have the wrinkled wontons today. Extra wrinkled. Yeah. Mmmm. Wrinkled wontons. Nice.”

  “Okay, Mark,” she said. “You do that.”

  “Or maybe some tight, cold, wrinkled wontons would be better,” he mused. “Long, hot wontons or cold, tight wontons? I just don’t know. What do you think, Anne? You like wontons? Are you a fan of wontons?”

  “Please stop saying ‘wontons,’” she said, understanding too late how methodically he’d been leading them to this place. All his little questions about exotic menu items, all his teasing little intimations of scat and sex, had been ways of gauging her limits, seeing how far he could go, and, having coaxed a small chortle from her, he felt he had all the encouragement he needed. He stayed on the word “wonton” for another two minutes, whispering it, mouthing it, adding prefixes—loose wontons, slippery wontons, baggy wontons—letting the joke bloat from the merely puerile to the mildly funny to the momentarily hilarious and leading her to chortle again, louder this time. She resented being cast as the straight man already, but she couldn’t help it. Her br
other and all his friends had trained her in appreciation of the boyish game.

  “Pupu,” he said, changing gears. “I’d like a pupu platter. With some poon-poon on the side.”

  “Oh God. Please.”

  “You don’t favor the pupu? Well, your loss.”

  “Seriously, Mark . . .”

  “Sorry. I’m just talking about eating some pupu here. I don’t know what you’re thinking . . .” He giggled at his own juvenile riffs, too rich to give a shit what anyone thought.

  Anne raised her menu, not wanting to reveal the smile he’d induced. Mark Harris was such a ridiculous, pathetically childish person, but his childishness was almost an act of mercy in a way, preemptive forgiveness for whatever passing image flared to life in one’s head, an invitation to honesty and maybe even intimacy of sorts. At the very least, it was the thing that allowed her to look past all the red flags for the course of a lunch date, a lunch that he was paying for, after all, and that was going to be obscenely expensive when the bill came.

  “Wow,” he said, his attention suddenly captured, doglike, by movement on the other side of the patio.

  “The salmon tataki sounds good,” she said.

  “Wow,” he said again. “I mean, wow.”

  “Okay, what, Mark?” she said, eyes still focused on the menu. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “You should just look at that lady over there,” he said. He was openly staring now, daring her to follow his gaze.

  “I’m not looking,” she said.

  “Just look,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “And stop staring, seriously. It’s rude.”

  “I’ll stop if you just look.”

  Anne refused to look, keeping her eyes glued to the word “donburi.” She wondered if this was an average meeting for Mark Harris. Thus far, not a word about business had been spoken; instead, there had been only this constant initiatory hazing. She guessed his locker-room antics served him well in most situations. She’d just never seen such an energetic specimen of his type.

  A slight displacement of air and a readjustment of Mark’s gaze told her the object of his attention was passing nearby, and just to make him stop bothering her, she took a quick peek. The object turned out to be a woman so obese, she could barely walk. She was like a hippo, lumbering on her giant trunks, wearing sheer yoga clothes, with golden princess slippers and a glittering tiara and hot-pink, manicured nails. She was like a monstrous five-year-old child, probably the overfed wife of some despotic Hollywood producer, deformed by wealth and patriarchy and celebrity worship and likely a large dollop of mental illness to boot.

  “Okay, okay. I saw her,” Anne said, turning back to the menu, disgusted on every level—with the woman, with Mark Harris, with herself.

  “She sure is fat,” he said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “I’m just kind of amazed, is all,” he said, still tracking the woman’s halting progress across the patio. “How do you get up in that, anyway? You’d drown.”

  Anne dropped her menu, aghast, and stared at Mark. Was it possible he’d really said something that insanely awful? Was she supposed to just let that pass? For a second they stared at each other, probing each other’s eyes for clues of character, judgment, wisdom, intention. His eyes were hazel with brown bursts around the pupils, flanged by long, sensitive lashes, and they didn’t look apologetic in the least. But nor did she sense anything really malicious in his eyes, either. If anything, Mark Harris looked as shocked as she was by the words that had just jumped out of his mouth. He was a radio, as blameless as a transistor receiving its signals. Once the initial horror of his words wore off, they both started laughing, helplessly, for almost a minute.

  During the laughing fit, Mark Harris looked as if he was suffocating, astonished by his good luck in a dining partner. He’d said something truly terrible, and here she was, still with him. Anne, for her part, tried not to encourage him any more than she already had, but she couldn’t help succumbing over and over again to the indefensible comedy of the situation. Her cheeks trembled; her ribs hurt. When they’d finally recovered, sighing, wiping their eyes, Mark made another few halfhearted plays to milk the joke, but the laughter was all dried out, and in the end he settled on raising the day’s real agenda, water.

  He daubed his eyes, his voice cracking around the edges. “So, Anne. Anyway. Phew. Sorry about all that. I’m really embarrassed. No excuse for that. It’s not really how I think . . . or, not how I want to . . . or . . . you know. I think we were here to talk about something important, right?”

  “So I was led to believe.”

  “Well, this is what I want to talk about,” he said, and held up his glass of water. He took a gulp. “Water.”

  “Okay,” she said. The endorphins must have flooded her bloodstream, filling her veins with some natural tranquilizer, because she found herself willing to entertain whatever presentation came her way.

  “You guys are on the verge of a major water crisis down here, you know,” he said. “L.A. has maybe a few years of water left, and that’s it.”

  “That’s what I always hear,” Anne said.

  “Do you know approximately how much water your city uses every day?”

  “Not offhand, nope.”

  “Over a billion and a half gallons a day in the greater Los Angeles area.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “Yep. It is. And you know how much comes out on the other end as waste?”

  “Nope.” If there had been any doubt the joking was over and he really wanted to talk about wastewater, his next monologue erased it. She was almost impressed by how fluidly he’d transitioned from crassness into salesmanship. Not many people could compartmentalize themselves that cleanly.

  “Three hundred million gallons of wastewater a day are generated by the system,” he said. “Most of that ends up in cleaning pools down in Terminal Island. The effluvium gets pulled out, turned into biogas and fertilizer. And then the leftover water gets pumped into Santa Monica Bay. You’ve got a pipe that leads five miles out, spilling all that stripped water back into the ocean. Right now you guys are only reusing a tiny fraction of the wastewater you produce, and most of that’s just going to golf courses. So that’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m interested in purchasing the rights to Los Angeles County’s wastewater. I want to see that wastewater put to use.”

  Anne was returning to her senses now, coming back into her professional wits. The instinctive critical faculties were coming back online, one by one. “Still sounds like you probably want to talk to someone in Sanitation,” she said. “I can give you some names if that would be helpful—”

  “No, no,” he cut her off. “I don’t see too many supportive voices over there. I’d much rather buy the city’s brown, hairy cornwater from you.”

  “I don’t think the rights to our wastewater are mine to sell, Mark.”

  “See, that’s the thing, though,” he said. He dunked a piece of grilled octopus in his soy sauce and held it in the tongs of his chopsticks. “They’re not anybody’s to sell, per se. The city’s wastewater isn’t really viewed as a commodity right now. It doesn’t really have any agreed-upon value yet. Technically, it’s more like garbage. It would be like buying the rights to all your banana peels or your old diapers. But I’m willing to take it off your hands because I’m a nice guy.”

  “Well, that’s very generous of you, I’m sure. But still, Sanitation . . .”

  “I’m willing to pay the city quite generously for it. Can’t a guy just buy the rights to some brown, hairy cornwater in this country or what?”

  “Stop saying that, please.”

  “Brown, hairy cornwater?” he said, scanning the patio before bringing his eyes to rest on her own. “You don’t like when I say brown, hairy cornwater? All right. I’ll stop saying brown, hairy cornwater as soon as you sell me all the brown, hairy cornwater. Then I’ll stop.”

  “Why do you want it?”

&
nbsp; “I just know that something’s got to give here, man. The world can’t afford to use water only one time anymore. Especially people living in deserts, like you. There’s a global emergency in front of us. People might not like the idea of drinking their own sewage, but, believe me, they’ll get used to it pretty quick. A few years from now, no one’s even gonna think about it anymore. You’ll just recycle your sewage, and you’ll assume you always did. That’s what I want to see, ultimately.”

  “And what’s in it for you, exactly?”

  “For me? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what’s in it for you? I doubt this is just a charity mission.”

  “I honestly believe in the need to reuse this resource, Anne. The future of our species depends on it. But if that isn’t enough reason, I’ll admit this, too: wastewater is currently a radically undervalued commodity in the world economy. Right now it’s just a problem to deal with. In a few years, wastewater is going to be the next oil and gold and diamonds rolled into one.”

  “You want to become the world’s first used-water salesman.”

  “I want to figure out a way of monetizing this truly priceless element. I want to create a new marketplace to tap its potential for everyone’s growing needs. That turns me on, I’ll admit. If I end up making some money off the deal in the long run, hey, that’s great, too. I’m okay with that.”

  Anne was again aghast. She could read between the lines here. It might look as though they were just sitting calmly, eating their wildly overpriced octopus, but in reality they were talking about monetizing the very future itself. Mark wanted to own what currently belonged to the people, the very substance of life, and sell it back to them at a grotesque profit. Was evil being born right here in front of her? A man like Mark Harris waking up and deciding he wanted to hang dollar signs on the air, run his credit card through a glassy brook? The ambition was so wrong on so many levels. It’s possible this is what the face of evil looks like today, she thought. A guy from Seattle with an iPad and a mesh bag from REI.