Freebird

by John Raymond

  “What is cavitation, exactly?” she’d asked Mark upon first receiving the Document, her ten minutes of scrutiny not garnering much insight.

  “Bubbles,” Mark had explained over the phone. “Turns out a lot happens when a bubble pops. A lot of energy gets released. Cavitation is basically an attempt to harness the energy of tiny bubbles while they’re imploding. People have been thinking about it as a possible alternative energy source for a long time. But it turns out there are applications for clean water, too.”

  “What are the applications?”

  “Well . . . ,” There was a long silence. “That I can’t exactly explain.”

  The beauty of the Document was exactly this coy refusal to disclose its own object. There were blueprints of newly patented water-jet pumps, plunger pumps, and bypass throttle valves, but because the central technology was still technically in development and specific information remained proprietary, the ultimate black box in the middle was not viewable. In place of hard evidence, the Document made promises. It promised, for instance, a machine capable of destroying all waterborne organic contaminants and organic microorganisms without any residual chlorine or carcinogens in the by-product. It promised a cost-neutral pilot project with no risk whatsoever to Los Angeles’s budget, funded and administered by BHC Industries. In convincingly flat, bureaucratic sentence fragments, it promised a future in which low-cost drinking water was not only cheap and available to all but forever replenishable.

  In essence, the Document was a tantalizing mirage, a Trojan horse built of vague, hopeful assertions. The estimated budget was a fiction. The underperforming German pilot project of two years previous was not mentioned. The precise details of the private funding consortium, BHC Industries in partnership with German research conglomerate EMU Unterwasserpumpen, were left unstated. But the mirage didn’t have to be deep, Mark reasoned. It had only to last long enough to beguile Charlie and the other relevant city officials into handing over the permit. After that, the mirage could plausibly disappear in any number of ways—scientific, seismic, financial—without raising suspicion. So long as the permit existed, legally establishing BHC as the gatekeeper to whatever technology eventually won the day, it didn’t matter—the monetizing of the permit could begin in earnest. They could start selling their futures, bundling their options, whatever it took to awaken the animal spirits of the marketplace and bring the mirage to reality.

  A mirage. A Trojan horse. But was the Document a lie? Anne asked herself as she gathered her papers. Locking the door, her copy of the Document tucked in her canvas bag, she had to admit, yes, it probably was. But it was a lie of a certain softness and edgelessness. It was a lie without any clear victims. And, assuming the world was in fact moving in the direction of the lie, that really made it less a lie than a prophecy of sorts, didn’t it? A smart bet. In any case, she was merely the emissary of the lie, the ignorant mule go-between, able to plead innocence at any step along the way. Her reputation might end up tarnished a bit, she might look a little dumb, her ramrod brother would be appalled, but her actions would never be construed as outright criminal by a jury of her peers. Entering the building, she was doing a pretty good job of stilling the slosh of bile in her gut. She had to start thinking like Mark now, thinking like the devil. She had to go sell it.

  The man at the desk who took her name and buzzed Charlie was slow in the way of an aging surfer, his face a blistered and pocked wreck of precancerous flesh. Once, long ago, he’d probably been an Adonis among men, but the pleasures of youth had taken their toll. He spoke her name into a phone with a gravelly, twangy monotone and told her to sit, then sank into a near coma. Thankfully, Charlie was soon down, pleased to welcome her to his kingdom of shit.

  “Welcome to the machine,” he said, holding the door and directing her deeper inside. “You want the grand tour?”

  “Actually, yeah,” she said. “I’ve always kind of wondered about this place.”

  “Well. Allow me to fulfill your lifelong dreams . . .”

  He took her up a flight of echoing stairs, through a metal door, onto a landing, through another metal door, and out onto a mesh walkway skirting the main building, all the while talking over his shoulder about the various attributes of the facility:

  “So, Terminal Island is one of the four major treatment plants in the city,” he said. “We get about sixteen million gallons of wastewater through here on a daily basis. Sixty percent of which comes from industry, the rest from private residences. We can go as high as forty-two million gallons in a major storm if we have to.”

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “Not even close.”

  They continued along a catwalk and arrived at a platform overlooking the entire compound. In the distance the harbor shone in the sun, and up in the sky the smug face of the Alaska Airlines logo passed by on a descending plane. Shouting over the engine’s roar, Charlie pointed out the Terminal Island headworks, where the wastewater entered the system and where the largest incoming solids—from branches, plastics, rags, down to sand and other gritty materials—were removed by a series of bars and screens. From there, he gestured, the fluid flowed on to primary treatment—covered, underground, oxygen-rich aeration tanks in which most of the solids sank to the bottom and bacteria consumed most of the rest. The bacteria and the finest solids were then separated from the wastewater in clarifiers, and some of the biomass was sent back to the aeration tanks for additional treatment. Secondary effluent was treated to remove the very smallest solid particles. Coagulant was added. Then the fluid was pumped through microfiltration membranes, then through reverse osmosis membranes. Then it was chlorinated, then dechlorinated, all preliminary to disposal in Los Angeles Harbor and injection in the Dominguez Gap. Anne wasn’t exactly sure what she was meant to glean from all this information. Was he giving her some kind of test? Or did he think he was taking a test? She wasn’t sure who was supposed to be testing whom.

  “The water comes out of here cleaner than the water you drink,” Charlie finished as another plane descended overhead, half drowning him out.

  “So why don’t we drink it?” she wondered loudly.

  “Well, it’s pretty stepped on by the time we’re done,” he said. “It smells weird. Technically, it’s very clean, but we only use it for industrial purposes anyway.”

  “What did the city do before all this?” she asked.

  “We used to just dump the raw sewage out there.” He pointed at the horizon. “Hard to believe, but the world is actually getting cleaner around here. You remember what the air and water used to be like in this city.”

  “I remember,” she said. And she did. She remembered the smog alerts, the oily runoff in the gutters, the incredible quilt of litter on the roadsides and in the arroyos. The city was cleaner in some ways. No point in mentioning all the ways it wasn’t, though, too, such as the pharmaceuticals in the reservoirs, the carbon emissions, the leveled foothills, the faraway, eradicated forests. If the world was getting less polluted, it was only because there was less of it to pollute. The world was practically used up.

  “So I looked at the stuff you sent,” he said. “Pretty interesting.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said, gulping the warm air from the ocean breeze. On the way over, she’d decided that understatement was going to be her tactic today. All opinions would derive from Charlie, and she would only respond positively or negatively. He’d be the one to explain the plan as he saw it; she would concur; and in this way she would lead him onward to whatever conclusions were already forming in his head, never indicting herself.

  “I hadn’t heard about this patent pending,” he said. “I knew people had been working on cavitation for a while. But this is a big step.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “No chlorine. No nothing.”

  “Yep.”

  “The effluent will be better than the water out of a tap.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your guys really think people a
re going to pay for water that’s already been used?”

  “So they say.”

  “They’re crazy.”

  The sun blasted a patch of water far out in the harbor, a sheet of pure white radiance, and seagulls drifted on the torrents of air. Charlie didn’t seem to notice any of the scenery, however. He was too busy wrestling with his own knotted, inner objections to care.

  “I think they’re banking on a catastrophic shortage,” she said. “They’re pretty positive that someday people will pay for used water. They have the resources to lose a little until then.”

  “Not a bad bet. It’s going to cost some dollars, though.”

  “True,” she said.

  “And the city should really be the one building this reactor,” he said. “The city should be keeping its own water in the public domain.”

  “But the city won’t,” Anne pointed out. “It can’t.”

  “The city won’t, it’s true,” he agreed. “The people won’t pay for it. So we’ll all end up paying for the water later. We won’t plan ahead and keep it ourselves, but we’ll pay for it later. God, it’s pathetic. It looks like a very elegant idea, I’ll hand it to your guys.”

  Anne’s heart hurt, watching her old friend bend over for this reaming. Charlie’s long life of shouting in the streets, carrying placards, bawling out real estate developers in the name of the people, flashed before her eyes. He’d spent his entire adult career stewarding the public interest with almost nothing in the way of gratitude or material reward. And now he was girding himself to hand over the people’s most precious possession, its water, to the agents of speculative capital. It was a reaming she hadn’t really appreciated until this moment. But she quickly put the sadness out of her mind. The market was going to make it all better in the end. The market would solve the problems with its money magic.

  “Why a thousand years on the permit?” he asked, zeroing in on the very kernel of the Document’s true purpose.

  Because asking for a million years sounded preposterous, she didn’t say. Because everyone dreams of a thousand-year Reich.

  Instead she said: “The investors need some security. They’re ready to move on the construction as soon as possible, but they need a guarantee of access to the resource. A thousand years establishes the point. They lose it if they don’t use it. But they want a commitment from the city. That part’s not negotiable.”

  He stared at the harbor, unseeing.

  “Yeah. Makes sense.”

  He had a few more pro forma questions, and when they were answered to his satisfaction, he walked her back to her car, telling her all about the egg-shaped digesters and the fertilizer that squirted out of them into the hauling trucks. But during the whole walk she knew the real meat of the conversation had not yet even been touched. She could tell by Charlie’s rapid acceptance of the Document, and by the airy tone of his tour, that a turn was still somewhere in the offing. The topics thus far didn’t merit a face-to-face meeting, and Charlie might have been deeply into waste, but he was not one to waste anyone’s time.

  “If this pans out,” he said, “we’re talking about a game changer.”

  “That’s what I’m starting to see,” she said. “I didn’t understand the science at first—I still don’t—but I’m starting to see the significance.”

  “It’ll be big, believe me.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  They reached the parking lot, and she started digging around for her keys, but sure enough Charlie seemed unprepared to let her go. He leaned on the car, hands in pockets, mulling something over until she finally asked him what he was thinking.

  “Your friends are probably going to lose a lot of money on this,” he said. “They definitely won’t see any dividends for a very long time.”

  “They’re into risk,” she said. “They see a lot of money in the long haul. And, like I said, they can afford to wait.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to Randy Lowell. Or maybe you already have.”

  “You’re the first one they wanted to reach out to. They’re still waiting to bring this to Randy. If you have any ideas about how to frame this for him, I’d love to hear them.”

  “No idea what that redneck will say.”

  They stood silently at the car as men in jumpsuits affixed a nozzle to a truck and filled it with bioslurry, and as the slurping, sucking, chugging sounds grumbled away, as if as an afterthought, with great effort to sound super casual, Charlie got around to what he really wanted to say all along.

  “So. I wanted to tell you about something I’ve been thinking about. I mean, if you still have a second, that is.”

  Here it came. “Of course,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

  “You guys are doing some great work, obviously,” he said, warming up. “This project is very exciting. And you and me—we’ve been doing some great work, too.”

  She nodded attentively, and Charlie leaned forward, his eagerness rising. He wasn’t the sort for seduction. Now that the ice was broken, he just blundered on through.

  “What I’ve been thinking,” he said, “and I’ve been talking about this for a while with my staff, and with the mayor’s office, too, is a new regional department for environmental communications. Some kind of sustainability czar for the whole region. We all know the city is one part of a much bigger regional sustainability problem. And we know there’s a lot of information falling through the cracks. We’ve got programs happening all over the West right now. This one here.” He tapped the Document, peeking from Anne’s bag. “This is important. What we need is someone who can coordinate everyone’s message. Someone working between your office, my office, all the other bureaus in the state, other states, too, and getting the word out. We did a survey last summer and found out almost no one outside Sanitation knows what we’re doing. There’s so much innovation, so much good information being generated, we need someone to organize it and get it out there . . .”

  He went on, comparing the new position with other positions of a similar cast. It could be comparable to a drug czar or the head of the National Security Agency. A coordinating agent. Through the whole of his presentation, Anne bobbed her head in constant, unquestioning agreement. She’d heard him talk about this idea before. It seemed as if he’d been talking about it for years. What he wanted was a Goebbels of sustainability. A propaganda minister to broadcast the news of his injection process and whatever his next unprecedented achievements might be. But she made every effort to pretend to hear it as if for the first time.

  “Yeah. Absolutely. Makes sense,” she said.

  And when he eventually came to a natural pause, she asked straight out, “So what do you need from me, exactly, Charlie? How can I help?”

  Charlie, too enthused by his own pitch to detect any reluctance or skepticism in Anne’s voice, barreled onward: “I want to get this position funded. And at the right level. I want this to be a real position. I don’t just want to fold it into someone else’s job description. I’m willing to throw down for the office space and fund most of the operating expenses, all out of my budget. But I need a contribution from Susan’s budget to pay the salary.”

  The screw had turned. The sharp tip had twisted and circled back in the mealy wood, digging deeper. The lie was asking for another lie. How many turns would it take before the thing was done?

  “How much are you talking about?”

  “If we want to attract someone with skills, we need to lay out at least a hundred fifty grand,” he said. “That’s still going to be a major haircut, compared with whatever someone’s making in Palo Alto.”

  “You have someone in mind?” She allowed a tinge of distaste into her voice. The only question was which of Charlie’s lieutenants would take the post.

  “No, no,” he demurred, obviously lying. “This is all just thinking out loud right now. This is the first I’m talking about it . . .”

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  Two minutes later Anne w
as driving away. Not a single diagram or pie chart had been brandished, nor a single catchphrase deployed. Her guns had remained holstered. Either she had just massacred her enemy without a single shot, or she had been massacred—she wasn’t sure which.

  But, settling back into her sun-hot car, she felt light and free. Massacrer or massacree, she was pleased with the meeting. The cards had been dealt, and now all the players wanted their piece of the action. It was in all the jostling and deal making that the ultimate compromise of reality came into being, that the future got made. The lying she’d done today was all part of the grand, wonderful game of reality.

  Pulling out of Terminal Island’s lot, she could see the palm trees of Venice shining like Roman candles, the sun bouncing off more cars than she could count, a million spiking stars in every direction.

  She drove with the windows down, warm wind blowing in her hair. If anything, she felt the opposite of remorse. As it turned out, after all these years, she’d been waiting to get her fingerprints on the future and haul in the bucketloads of cash. Who didn’t want that? Make me an offer, she thought. Lay me out on the stone altar and draw your pentagram of blood on my breasts. Plunge in the obsidian dagger. I’m ready to sell this soul, and cheap. Here she was, on the verge of perpetrating a gigantic, elaborate grift on her community, on the city for which she had fought so hard, so long, and all she could feel was fantastic. Driving down the river of cars, colors streaming on either side, she wondered: How many lies before nothing is the same? Before the whole world is made new? If Mark were there, she might have kissed him.

  17

  A blue Jeep was parked near his RV.

  What the fuck was that about? He sure as hell wasn’t expecting any visitors today. That was the whole point of this place. The location had been selected expressly for its inviolable privacy, four hundred yards from a road, backed against a desert wilderness of soul-testing dimensions. There was almost no way a Jeep could end up at his doorstep by accident. So what the fuck?