Freebird

by John Raymond

  “But what are we here for anyway, Anne?” he said, clapping his hands, and she could tell all the emotional capital she’d been storing up had suddenly been locked away. All her moist sympathizing had been for naught.

  “Lay it on me,” he said. “What’s up your sleeve, Anne? I know you called me for some reason. I’ve got a ton to do. It’s great seeing you, by the way.”

  “Great seeing you, too, Charlie,” she said, mindlessly brushing her skirt. “I’m glad you’re getting through everything all right. That was the main thing I wanted to know. But as long as we’re here, I do have a little thing to run by you, if you’ve still got some time.”

  “Sure. What’s the thing?” He snuck a look at his watch; he was such an asshole, he physically couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “It has to do with the city’s wastewater,” she said. “You have some jurisdiction in that area, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, I have a guy who wants to take a crack at recycling it. He wants to filter all the city’s wastewater and send it back into the drinking supply or something. He says he’s got some hot technology to get it pure enough for consumption, and he’s got the capital lined up to build the facility.”

  Here, she was embellishing on Mark’s plan a bit. Quite a bit, actually. But she didn’t see any other way. Something she always liked to remember about Charlie: in addition to being a great lover of the air and the water and the earth, he was also a major technophile, a pie-eyed optimist in the grand Silicon Valley model, lacking any of the twentieth-century nausea that Anne had always taken for granted as part of any mature worldview. If BHC could come at him with some kind of shiny gadget, she suspected, some kind of Next Big Thing for the treatment of wastewater, the pitch would be all that much easier. If she could only work in the word “membrane,” she’d have him.

  “He’d like to meet with you if you have the time,” she said, without obvious eagerness.

  “Who is this guy?”

  “His name is Mark Harris.”

  “Ahh. Harris.” Of course he knew him.

  “You know him?”

  “Never met him, no,” Charlie said, and Anne could tell by the minuscule stiffening of his spine that he was disguising his real, spinning thoughts. “He’s on a buying spree lately. He just bought Hoffman-Jenkins, the contractor that hauls most of our sludge. And he just bought a bunch of land south of Terminal Island. He’s circling us for some reason. Now you. What does he want, anyway? I’m getting curious.”

  “I don’t know what he wants, exactly,” she said, annoyed to lack crucial information going into her meeting. “I’m not a scientist. But he seems pretty serious. He’s funny, too. I think you’d like him. Or hate him; I don’t know. But he’s a big fan of yours, I can tell you that much.” She was embellishing even further now, but what did Mark expect if he didn’t give her the whole story? If only he knew the level of services he was purchasing.

  “Why doesn’t he just call me?” Charlie asked.

  “He will. I think he wants to go through the proper channels.”

  “It kills me,” Charlie said, grimacing at the sun. “People have no idea how much water we’re already recycling. You should tell him to check out the filtration system over in Lakewood. They’re keeping four golf courses alive on runoff from the city’s washing machines alone. Great pilot program. And no one knows shit about it.”

  “I think Mark is talking about something on a different scale,” Anne said, with due meekness. The last thing she wanted was to belittle Charlie’s current efforts. “I think he wants to reuse, like, all of it. He’s thinking pretty long-term.”

  “And you’re, like, his agent or something?”

  “No. I just fielded the call. He’s . . . I guess he’s a constituent.”

  “You think he’s that interesting?”

  She stared past the trunk of the eucalyptus tree, the insane tangle of roots diving under the sidewalk, and watched the first kids she’d seen go into the museum already streaming out, carrying their new coloring books and polyurethane woolly mammoth shapes. “Interesting” was a code word, coming from Charlie, she knew, a personal query into the character of Mark Harris. He was admitting his high regard for Anne after all these years but also that he had grave suspicions about her client. If Anne was willing to vouch for Mark Harris, maybe he would change his mind. And so, in this moment, Anne held Mark’s future in her hands. With a word, she could open this door, and all her hard-earned integrity could be thrown out to sea.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He seems smart to me. He seems interesting.”

  The sky didn’t open. Thunder didn’t call her name. Her voice quietly entered the matrix of Charlie’s mind and diffused through the labyrinth of other thoughts, other considerations. He’d absorbed her betrayal of principle and saw her no differently than he had moments before.

  They ended the meeting with promises of further talks, future collaborations, better daily contact in general. Anne wished Charlie good luck on his sexual misadventures; he wished her good luck on her spinsterhood. Driving home, she felt generally satisfied with how the conversation had gone. The meeting might not have delivered the killer blow she had hoped for most—he could have fallen on the ground and humped her leg over the mere possibility of giving away the city’s wastewater to some speculator—but it hadn’t gone badly, either. She hadn’t made any huge, humiliating mistakes.

  She got home at dusk, with the little red-breasted birds tittering in the bougainvillea, the sound of the street cleaner growling around the block. She unlocked the front door and went for the tea basket, selecting a Tension Tamer and putting on the water. Waiting for the pot to boil, she called Aaron, but he didn’t pick up. No news was good news, she figured, unless it was the worst news imaginable. She wondered what her brother was doing out in the desert, under the pale, dimming sky. She sat and stared at the patch of light on the wall, the rays marbled by the old, warped glass, reminding herself that this operation wasn’t going to resolve itself in one conversation. This was going to take some stages, some effort, probably even some duplication of effort. She’d planted the seed today, that was all. Now she’d see what hideous plant grew.

  11

  Ben bought a gray Pontiac Vibe, the ultimate invisible hatchback, for three grand, cash, and visited Holmes’s neighborhood on a muggy Wednesday afternoon. He approached the greater New York City area from the south, crossed the Verrazano, and twirled his way eastward into the hinterlands of Long Island, passing the austere saltboxes, the rustic vegetable stands, the all-American main street of Westbury. From there he tooled along the roads running beside the truly lavish properties on the coastline, where the houses were more like castles, cartoons of extreme privilege, and the grounds were planted with money trees and diamond grass. He passed Tudor, Georgian, and medieval manses, gargoyled, topiaried monuments of a gilded time when capital had had no compunction about spreading its leathery wings for all to see. His main thought, motoring along the fence lines, was of utilities. The heating bills here were probably more than the education budget of most central African nations combined.

  The invisible Vibe cut through the twilight and passed the entrance of the private road leading to Holmes’s estate. Ben continued on for another two hundred yards, until he came, as mapped, to a cul-de-sac near the beach and stood there inspecting the drab, pebbly spit of coastline for beer cans and fishing twine, deeming the litter sufficient to excuse the prolonged presence of a parked car. Then he ambled back the way he’d come, slipping past the private gate, and crept along the private road shoulder, alive with a child’s feeling of insurrection, imminent danger, and freedom. This was just pure fun now. He’d done nothing wrong yet, he had nothing to hide. If anyone asked, he was taking a walk on what could easily be construed by an innocent westerner as loose, public land.

  His footsteps seemed to explode on the thick leaf litter. From the satellite images, Ben had estimated about fifteen acres of elm and spruce
and chestnut contained in the chic belt of private roadway Holmes shared with his neighbors. Already it was plain the woods went largely unvisited. The trees were but a museum, their preservation a brute expression of the homeowner association’s untouchable influence.

  He almost hoped for some confrontation that would eject him from the Mission, but no confrontation came. The surrounding houses were lodged deep behind reinforced walls, electrified gates, and elaborate motion-detecting laser machines. There were no animals, not even birds, to be seen. He encountered not a single, legible sign to divert his course. He breathed the fragrant air with gusto. The joy of the unilateral mission was something Anne would never understand.

  He crossed a shallow ravine and mounted an ellipsis of boulders, already comprehending the topography quantumly better than any satellite map could have allowed. No surprise, the computer had been deceptive. This was an argument with the head shed every day. You want to know where the muzzle flashes are coming from? Stand here next to me. You want to know where the insurgent sniper is taking potshots? Sit here. Don’t tell us what we can see with our own eyes.

  He met back with the road across from Holmes’s front gate. The wall, as expected, was fifteen feet tall, yellow brick, with eight cameras grafted to the lamps and immediately visible. He could see a lightning rod on the roofline. The only big surprise was how deeply the forest floor sank down. He was effectively standing in a shallow bowl, looking up. But even if that hadn’t been the case, he still needed a higher position if he wanted to scope the front steps.

  Never stand when you can kneel, they say, and never kneel when you can lie down. But in this case he needed a tower. Just off the road shoulder he selected the thickest, most gnarled, most branch-studded option, a horse chestnut with burly arms, wide forks, and broad bloom. It turned out that all the attributes that made for a good climbing tree as a kid made for a good climbing tree now, as a killer, and he heaved himself upward, branch after branch, until the tile roof of Holmes’s estate spread into view, and higher still, until he could see most of the front acreage and a sliver of water beyond. As per the satellite images, the driveway ran directly across a broad, groomed lawn, fifty yards from gate to door, where it looped around a concrete fountain and spoked off to a four-car garage. The front door, the prize door, was a paneled oaken frieze planted at the top of seven, graceful, rounded steps.

  The sun was now setting, and the sky over the sound was erupting into a lurid orange brushfire. A few sails were visible on the water, and beyond, the trees of Connecticut. Down below, in the clouds of toxic hypoxia, lurked cherrystone clams, mud snails, red crabs, and sand tiger sharks gliding over the weedcovered electricity cables and fiber-optic transmission lines. There were plovers, turnstones, and yellowlegs in the air, turtles and bullfrogs on the banks, black gum and hickory in the surrounding hardwood forests. Depending on how you looked at it, Long Island Sound was many things: a machine, an ecosystem, a highway. But here in Michael Holmes’s neighborhood, amid his elite class, Ben knew it was mere decoration, a pretty backdrop for cocktail parties, morning tennis matches, and afternoon rounds of power conference calls.

  He closed his eyes and probed the neighborhood’s silence with his ears, listening for signs, but heard almost nothing. The silence of this neighborhood was wicked and unreal. In the silent air, he knew, invisible signals were streaming back and forth, spectral voices and pictures and numbers and data swirling. There were thousands of unseen eyes in the sky looking down, a million invisible guards in the tower. Ben knew he was probably being paranoid about the volume of space cameras above, but erring on that side was fine by him. Paranoia was a form of intelligence here. Fear was a form of imagination. He could feel the whole networked system vibrating just beyond the limits of his senses.

  Again, he understood a basic truth: the man with the clearest vision is the one on the bottom. He is the one who sees everything. The man on top sees dick. The trick was to stay on the bottom, to hold the low ground. It was the opposite of what they’d always said, of course. You had to stay low and fend off the illusions brought on by any upward progress through the world. The goal was stay low and to be an earth man. Ben was an earth man, all the way. He took his orders from the earth, and he always would.

  At 2043, the silence was broken by the sound of tires on the dry asphalt entering Ben’s immaculate mind. Through the shiver of leaves, Holmes’s limousine slid into view, long and black and gracefully slow, like one of those sharks prowling the ocean floor. The iron gate opened with a low, whirring growl, and the car eased inside the perimeter, swimming the channel to the front of the house. Ben watched, counting the beats of his heart. Gradually, the revolution of the tires slowed, and the car came to a halt. For twenty long heartbeats, nothing happened. The black box of the car idled, still. And then the door opened, exposing Holmes to the open air, sending his fragile skull bobbing six feet, five inches, above the ground.

  For two minutes Holmes stood beside the car, talking on his phone. His old pal, exposed. His jaw opened and closed, and the words entered the little box and zoomed into the cosmos, beaming to a satellite in space and bouncing back down to earth like a rain of meteors. The man speaking was just a vague shape, bleary with shadow, a scarecrow with ragged silver hair. If Ben had been holding a gun, he could have completed the Mission right then and there. Was this a sign, he wondered? He shouldn’t need signs anymore, only his own bedrock moral sense, but a clear sign would be nice. He hoped this was not the best shot he ever saw. He remembered all too well the five days lying at the border of the DMZ, in wait for Kim Jong Il, the only glimpse of his target coming in the first ten minutes, and after that, a blank concrete bunker wall.

  When Holmes’s call ended he tucked the phone in his coat and carried his skull up the steps, pausing while his hands unlocked the door and the gold light spilled over his silhouette. Holmes crossed the threshold. The door closed. The car, done waiting, swam out of view to its cave.

  Ben acquired a gun from the Camp Fire Club by way of theft. The Camp Fire Club sounded like a children’s troop, but in fact it was a hallowed, rich-guy hunting institution founded by Teddy Roosevelt and maintained by diamond-studded Wall Streeters and hedge fund assholes wanting the occasional power weekend in a woodland environment. Ben had done some hunting on Long Island before, and he’d seen the old-money lodges dotting the backcountry. He remembered one of them in particular, secluded and stately, likely unobserved in midweek and easy to break into. Without much problem he managed to find it again, and sure enough it was a bonanza, racked with cut-glass decanters, fine silver, a walk-in humidor, and oiled deer rifles behind glass. They liked their pricey equipment, all right. Ben had his choice of short-action Rugers and Brownings, long-range .280 Remingtons, and French-walnut-stocked .243 Winchesters, but in the end he selected the Echols Legend Sporter, glass mounted with a Leupold LR/T scope, already zeroed and ready to go.

  He was still waiting for a clear sign, but back at the hotel he drew the curtains and broke down the weapon, cleaning every component to his satisfaction. He stripped the action and examined the bore, finding it fouled ever so slightly. He used a plastic-coated cleaning rod and cotton swabs soaked in brake cleaner to remove the carbon residue, Hoppe’s No. 9 for copper, wiping his rod clean after each trip down the bore. Then he oiled the bore.

  As he worked, inhaling the fumes, photons of doubt speckled across his mind. Something in the familiar motions got him seeing himself in his proper proportion to the world’s future. Up until now the journey had been a purely theoretical exercise, like hunting big game with a camera. But the next phase, bearing a firearm, would be something else. He could feel his body entering into some cellular revolt against the Mission, his muscle tissue and circulatory system refusing to endanger themselves without good reason.

  He turned on the TV for distraction, and like a sign, the face of Shane Larson, the talk-show host, appeared. Larson was a truly reprehensible being, a meat-faced pundit of the angry-right
variety. He was the host of the nationally syndicated Shane Larson Show, on both TV and radio, the author of bestselling books against Islam and the rights of women, and a reliable supporter of any and all violent death in the Southern Hemisphere. He had a bottomless sympathy for bankers and corporate executives, regardless of crime, and his main goal in life seemed to be goading his audience into armed warfare against the poor and less fortunate. Never had there been an underdog he didn’t kick.

  Ben recoiled to think he’d once counted himself a fan, had even listened with rapture back in the days leading to the war, seeking ways to justify the killing he’d so badly wanted to do. He’d sucked in all the talk of WMDs and taking the fight to the enemy’s home, ignoring the many untruths about Larson’s reality. Now he despised Larson and recognized his bullying as a pathetic tool of oppression. Larson was a buffoon and a murderer. He was every racist asshole dad at every childhood barbecue of his life. To see him on the cheap hotel screen now, crawling with digital fungus, was nearly too much.

  The sound was low, and Ben couldn’t tell what Larson was talking about, only that he was fulminating at typically high pitch. His pink face was shaking, and spittle was collecting at the edges of his lips. Ben wished seethingly he could reach out and pull Larson through the screen. He wanted to beat him savagely while shouting some of his prized Anatole France quotes into his face: “‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging for money, and stealing bread’!” Or: “‘You think you are dying for your country; you are dying for the industrialists’!” But maddeningly, Larson was unreachable. He was too far away, too oblivious to Ben’s very existence, to be shamed. Soon the segment was over, and the next show was coming on, and Ben, still unsure where he was going, built a suppressor.