Freebird

by John Raymond

  “So now we just have to figure out how this coalition comes together,” he said. “What do you think, wise consultant? What does Charlie need to hear next? And how can I help you in this process?”

  “I think he’s kind of expecting to hear something from you,” she said. “In fact, I kind of told him that was happening. I told him you had some designs to show him.”

  “And what kind of designs do you mean?”

  “I was vague. I didn’t know what to say. That’s your department.”

  “What did you mean, exactly, by ‘designs’?”

  Anne had been hoping for some sort of tacit understanding at this juncture of the conversation. Some gentle mind reading. A significant look or two. She’d done her part and opened the doorway—wasn’t that enough? Now he was supposed to carry her across the threshold. But the blank, bovine look on his face told her she was going to have to spell out the next step after all, which also meant spelling it out to herself.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Designs for whatever it is you want to do with the wastewater. The filtration plant or the bottling factory or the delivery system or whatever. I hope it’s something pretty cool-looking, is all. Charlie likes cool. He’s susceptible to cool.”

  Mark scowled, less than enthusiastic about what she was saying. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from him, but it wasn’t this. She’d assumed he understood there would have to be some subterfuge in the process, a little smoke and mirrors. The City of Los Angeles wasn’t just going to hand over the wastewater without some hard promises on his part.

  “I don’t have any designs, though,” he said.

  “I thought you owned the contracting company that carries the waste,” she said. “And the land around the treatment plant. Sounds like plans to me.”

  Mark shook his head. “The plan here is to create the market for second-use water. That’s all. The market decides how it happens. I’m only interested in creating the conditions for innovation to occur. That’s my role.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s what Charlie wants to hear. That doesn’t exactly motivate him.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t understand the nature of markets.”

  To that she had no idea what to say. Was Mark Harris really such a true believer in the magic of free markets? Were they really that far from reality?

  “Markets are the key to all creative invention,” Mark went on, in a practiced tone. This was apparently one of the postulates of his whole life, much repeated. “And markets operate on the law of desire. Somebody wants something, and pretty soon somebody else decides they want it, too. People compete over the best price, the best cut. That’s how demand grows. That’s how wealth gets made. But someone has to start wanting something first. Someone has to stick his neck out and say, yeah, I want this. Over here. I want this used water. I want this Cabbage Patch doll. That’s got value. This is just basic economics here, Anne. I’m the first wanter in the picture. That’s my role. That’s it.”

  “Funny,” she said. “I always thought wealth was made by exploiting labor. Silly me.”

  “Ha-ha. So maybe there are two ways of creating wealth, then. There’s fucking over the workers, and there’s redefining the nature of reality. I’d rather go the latter route whenever possible.”

  “Yeah, well, someone still has to build the new reality, you know, Mark. And clean the new reality. And fix the pipes in the new reality. If you want Charlie’s wastewater, you’re going to have to give him a specific blueprint. I’m sure about that.”

  “If Charlie is open to the monetization of his resource, I bet we can find the right price.”

  “No,” she said, starting to get annoyed. “See, Charlie doesn’t care about monetization. Monetization isn’t going to help Charlie. He doesn’t control the money flow. The money is for Randy and the city council. They’re in charge of the purse. Charlie, he needs something else. He needs romance. Don’t you get that?”

  Mark shifted on his bench, looking even more uncomfortable. The simplicity of his plan, such as it was, was becoming ruffled and bent around the edges. He wanted to salvage it before it got torn. “So, what are we talking about here? You’re kind of losing me.”

  “He wants some kind of game changer,” she said. “Some kind of next-gen technology. A secret machine. He wants to know he’s part of the future. Not everything is money, you know.”

  “Monetizing his resource is what’s going to make all those things happen.”

  Anne shook her head, appalled. Market, market, market. How many times was Mark going to give the same answer to every question? He was autistic for the market. He was a big market queen.

  “He needs a good story, Mark,” she repeated. ”Does that make any sense to you? You need to tell him a good story.”

  “Okay,” Mark said. “So, like what? He wants some kind of miracle machine? Some kind of giant robot squid off the coast that’ll turn his shit water into honey? Is that it? He needs to see plans for that?”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “Great. One giant, shit-eating robot squid coming up.”

  “Good. Perfect.”

  They both drank, retreating to their corners, trying to catch up on where the plot had just gone. Anne could feel the beer settling in her gut, fuzzing her brain. Already she was dreading the uphill part of the ride. Meanwhile, Mark had begun gnawing on his lips and casting his eyes at the splinters of the table as if some answer might appear at his fingertips. To avoid watching his pathetic display, she turned her gaze back to the attractive, chestnut-haired families milling among the produce bins and let her irritation flow in their direction. How she would have loved to slap all the organic turnips and melons from their hands and out them as the true racists they really were. I know all about your secret lynchings in the woods, she wanted to yell, even if you don’t know about them yourselves. I know all about your secret, volkisch dreams.

  She turned back to Mark, staring unhappily at his beer, and a half smile of contempt crossed her face. How funny, she thought. All this time she’d been assuming Mark was the devil, tempting her. But ah, look who was the devil now.

  They finished the ride, which, barring ten minutes of screaming leg burn, never got that difficult, and parted ways until dinner. The restaurant Mark chose was on the east side of town, and with only a woodstove and a Bunsen burner, the chef turned out some of the most subtle dishes Anne had ever eaten in her life. The roasted trout with charred leeks was so good, she wondered if she had ever truly eaten food before in her life.

  And yet, this place made her angry, too. She couldn’t help it. The decor was so uniformly perfect, it was almost offensive. The perfect wooden tables, with no adornment to detract from the lovely grain of the pine, the bar with the perfect bouquet of incredible wildflowers in the perfect antique vase, like a perfect, dry explosion of pink and orange and fuchsia. The perfectly good taste displayed everywhere was just another form of narrow-mindedness, she thought. How about some ugly doily or heavy velvet drapes to mar the perfection? The scrupulous curation of the room, of the whole town, felt like a form of ethnic cleansing.

  It didn’t help that Mark was still trying so hard to get his head around the next step. For a pirate of speculative capitalism, he was incredibly fastidious about taking a risk.

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with where this is going,” he said, picking at his gorgeous beet salad. “It almost seems like you’re asking me . . . to lie.”

  Anne kept herself from groaning. After all he’d done, this was where he drew the line? He was a billionaire real estate developer, a master of greenwashing, a creator of bloated stadiums and mirrored condos, and yet he held so tightly to his graduate school abstractions. A part of her wanted to protect his quaint self-perception, though a larger part wanted to crush him into the dirt.

  “I’m telling you to be specific, that’s all, Mark,” she said, with as much patience as she could muster. “You have to show him something. You
have to give him a plan. And I’m just telling you to be optimistic in your assessment of the plan. Optimism isn’t lying, as far as I know, right? That’s just my advice. As a consultant. The final decision is up to you. Obviously.”

  He pushed his beets around, and she wondered, flickeringly, if her own conscience should be alarmed. Was she really proposing some kind of fraudulence? But no, she thought, her advice was all within the bounds of fair play. She was only urging a little showmanship on Mark’s part, the throwing of some hard elbows. And interestingly, even as the flicker of introspection brightened to a slight twinge, she found she didn’t really care. Moral peril was not an entirely unpleasant sensation, it turned out. A good scheme demanded the destruction of some received idea, and they were entering a grand scheme now. The first victim was Mark Harris’s own illusion of goodness.

  “Look, Mark,” she said, breaking into his shell of contemplation. “Look at it this way: we’re all on the same team here, right? You, me, Charlie, the city commissioners, all of us. We all want the same thing, which is pure water delivered to as many people as cheaply as possible. Is that not true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you truly believe the privatization of the wastewater will be the quickest and most efficient way to bring that reality into being?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you just need to help Charlie feel comfortable with that reality.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it. Help him feel comfortable.”

  “And if you don’t know the exact details, then some provisional details are okay. It’s all moving in the same direction.”

  “See, now that makes some sense to me.”

  They ended the night with drinks in a rustic hotel bar, surrounded by the Pendleton clones of the creative class, the shoe whores, the ninth-generation post-punk poseurs, by which time Mark was coming around to the notion that Milton Friedman alone wasn’t getting him to the end zone on this one.

  “I see what you’re saying,” he said, stewing over his fourth Macallan single malt since dinner. “I do. I just don’t know what the solution is yet.”

  “There must be some new ideas that could excite a guy like Charlie,” Anne said. Her endurance for the topic was turning out to be much greater than she’d thought. After sixteen hours, two meals, and many, many drinks, she was still keeping pace, if not pulling the vast weight of their strategic planning. She could remember these kinds of sessions in the early days with Susan, but it had been a long time since her scheming faculties had been so fully engaged.

  “Sure. There are people working on sonophoto-chemical oxidation, photo-Fenton processes, catalytic advanced oxidation. Lots of things.”

  “So you know something about this stuff.”

  “I have investments in a few companies that do R and D. Part of the whole eco-portfolio. I read the shareholder reports.”

  “So there you go. I’m sure any of these things could be great.”

  A few more drinks and they still hadn’t arrived at a concrete solution, but Mark’s resolve was strengthening. He wouldn’t speculate on the exact nature of the next move, but he was at least willing to exercise himself on the moral necessity of continuing with the plan by whatever means necessary.

  “There shouldn’t even be a city in that desert,” he slurred as the bar sounds crashed around them. “Your city is fucking the whole western ecosystem. Yours and Las Vegas. You all are going to be coming for our water one day no matter what. I’m just trying to even the score here. Let Southern California pay the north for once. Time the north took its due. Consider it a consumption tax. We’ve got to teach you people to drink your own shit before you come for our watershed.”

  She laughed at his tirade. He was being absurd, but she didn’t mind. She liked Mark better in this engorged state. At last, he was giving her the kind of fearful, paranoid, vengeful thinking she could get behind.

  She didn’t sleep well that night—the pillows were too fat—and in the morning the town car was waiting again, ready to ferry her back home, following the invisible bread crumbs. Car to airport to car to home, every step greased with capital. How frictionless the world became with immense reservoirs of money on your side. She could get used to this life, she thought, to Mark’s life, that was. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she might have been trying out for more than being his consultant on this trip. If so, she wasn’t going to think about it now.

  Sitting in business class—for only a two-hour flight, such a waste—she accepted a glass of white wine, hair of the dog, and a pile of unopened magazines, spreading herself out to the maximum degree. The plane took off, and the fuzz of mist clinging to the trees and valleys was like a fine mold growing on the fruit of the earth. The city banked in her window and shrank from view, and soon the ancient topography of the western rain forest was scrolling below.

  The woods were but a shadow of their former self, a patchwork of clear-cuts in varying states of paltry regrowth, more a giant, groomed lawn than the primordial jungle of yore. It had taken billions of years for God to build this forest and only about a hundred years for men to mow it down. In two lifetimes the entire earth had been pruned and angled and sheared into this last, vestigial geometry.

  She sighed and shut the plastic window shade, not wanting to see. She didn’t want to watch TV, either—that would only be more depressing—so she reached for a magazine but couldn’t find anything worth reading. She sighed and put the magazines back in the seat pocket and leaned back in the wide, comfortable seat. She closed her eyes, hoping sleep might take her, while speeding along at hundreds of miles per hour through empty space.

  14

  Everything leading up to the killing was the easy part. He just had to drive out to Long Island and climb a tree. It would be only after the bullet left the barrel that the trouble would really begin. Only after the bullet entered Holmes’s body, shredding his organs, and all the alarms had gone up, and the dragnet had been called out, that things would truly change. And from that moment onward, the danger would be constant, accompanying Ben for the rest of his life, clinging to his shoulders and jabbering in his ear for all eternity. Once the bullet left the muzzle and stole Holmes’s life, Ben would step permanently through the dark curtain of the law, to the other side.

  Was it worth it? He still wasn’t able to tell. Sitting at the fork of the branch, his deer rifle in his lap, he tried to peer beyond the curtain of the law, but the curtain was too thick, too voluptuous. The curtain was like black wool with heavy brocade, a sculpted drapery allowing past no light, traced with golden writing that couldn’t be read.

  Ben had felt his share of anguish about his violence over the years. There had been many killings, some of them unsavory. But in the past the killings had always been solidly on the side of the law. All his murdering had been in the name of his country and the Constitution, and he’d always walked away afterward with a clear conscience. But in his new life he would take full and complete personal responsibility for his acts.

  Sweat collected under his arms, and a nerve ticked in his neck. In taking complete personal responsibility, he would be stepping beyond man’s law into the realm of a deeper law, acting as his own interpreter of God’s law at last. Was that good? He sat there with his gun, comprehending that he was on the verge of a sacrifice in the ancient form. Soon he would enter directly into conversation with the burning bush inside his head, casting off the robe of man’s lies to become Death itself. And he would have to accept the curdling fear as part of the due.

  His body was shaking as it never had on a mission before. Death could be afraid, he now knew. Death could be indecisive. Death was rarely gentle. Death was occasionally sudden. Would he be Death tonight? And if so, which Death would he be?

  The moon edged along on its path. His gun sat in his lap, muzzle greasy gray in the darkness, and electric pulses charged through his nervous system, sizzles of energy snapping through his relays. He thought about Holmes and the judgment upon him. Hol
mes didn’t deserve death, exactly, although the case could be made that he did. The case could be made for many things. The case could even be made that killing Holmes was evil. Could evil action bring good result? Now, that was a question for the rabbis. Somewhere a dog hoarsely barked.

  He doubted if any commander had ever worried over his orders in the way he worried tonight. No general he knew had ever truly suffered over the massive death he sowed without reason. They should do some killing of their own sometimes, he thought. See how cautious they got after washing themselves in blood. How amazing it was to think that the men making death never killed with their own hands.

  Ghosts were flashing in the corners of his eyes, but he refused to turn his head. If he didn’t look they would disappear, he hoped. He didn’t want them to lead him down a path to insanity.

  He looked at the empty road. The killing tonight might be insane. He might be on the verge of perpetrating an insane act. Doing evil to fight evil, casting black magic to coax evil into sight—it sounded insane. But it was a necessary insanity in hunting the particular species of evil he sought. It wasn’t the evil of maniacs and slashers he was after tonight, the horrible, incomprehensible evil of rapists and baby molesters. The newspapers and cops took care of that kind of evil. There were prisons for those people. There were also bolts of lightning, venomous snakes, flash floods, hurricanes. Those were not his evil. Those were ugly mistakes in God’s design.

  No, the evil he was hunting was the systematic kind. The evil he now knew to be always out there, ubiquitous and discreet. The evil not of Hitler but of Germany, everywhere and nowhere at once. It was evil without actors, without authors, the evil that never stuck to a single name. That was the evil he wanted to destroy. The evil of toxic pollution, preemptive war, redlining, and default mortgage swaps. The evil of racist innuendo and unnamed rumors. The evil of nighttime roundups. The evil of anti-Semitism. The evil of history itself.