A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  If the senator were told that he had just seconds to live and were then asked to describe his legacy, he might well admit that it had been to fill the Cambodian forests with bodies and land mines to no ultimate purpose but the nobility of conflict. He might mention the hopes he had once had for his marriage or the scattered and fleeting feelings of deep affection he had felt over the years for a young woman who lived on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Georgetown. But he had never truly loved anything but the war.

  If pressed – even a single moment before his peaceful death on cool, starlit sheets, having outlived nearly everyone – Daniel would refuse to admit that his most genuinely lasting achievement had been to choke the rivers and oceans with industrial waste. If Daniel were asked to describe the purpose of his life, he might well say that he had been born to love Susan, and that his life had begun in earnest in the waning years of the 1980s, on the chilly, rainy Wednesday that he first held Susan’s hand.

  In fact, three significant things happened to Daniel on that chilly Wednesday, the day after his unfortunate encounter with Natalie in the art gallery: he held Susan’s hand for the very first time; he listened to a radio report about “wormholes,” those scientifically endorsed passageways through space and time; and he took a trip to the Edward Bear Plastics Factory across the river in New Jersey, the site – as it would later turn out – of his defining legal success.

  A thin sheet of fog covered the small industrial town on that chilly Wednesday, but it was a fog that oozed darkness, a fog that seemed to belch and fart as Daniel’s car passed through it; stench pressed in from all sides. Daniel took a sharp right past the landfill, then across a wooden bridge, which ran over a small creek, flowing by slowly, black and lethargic, a melanoma growth on the face of the earth.

  At this point in his life, Daniel had not yet even met Susan. He’d never heard her name spoken. And so, halfway across the bridge, when a love song came on the radio, Natalie popped into his mind, just filling in the void.

  Daniel parked his car a few miles from the landfill in front of a pleasant, small-town home with a white picket fence out front and a dog barking good-naturedly in the yard. Mr. Connors, Daniel’s host for the afternoon, was missing an arm, but looked otherwise fit, relatively happy. His wife, in the kitchen, was making coffee, and performing the other inscrutable kitchen tasks that the world seemed to expect of seventy-year-old wives when they were in the kitchen. The Connors home was bright and comfortable, and light seemed to seep in from another time and place. Daniel sat across the table from Mr. Connors in the old man’s dining room.

  He knew that he was not the right person for this sort of task. Interviewing witnesses required interpersonal skills that Daniel lacked, despite all his fierce intelligence. His grim reserve was such that when he made eye contact, his gaze was piercing, discomfiting, and others would often look away. As a result, in conversation Daniel usually kept his eyes averted, which made him seem distant and difficult to trust. He was well-aware of these psychic impedimenta but felt unable to discard them.

  Daniel smiled self-consciously at Mr. Connors. He turned on the tape recorder.

  “Statement of Mr. Joseph (Jack) Connors,” he began. “Mr. Connors, are you aware that the tape-recorder is on?”

  Connors nodded.

  “Please, if you could speak into the – ”

  “Yes, yes,” Mr. Connors said. “I know all about that.” He paused. “I still don’t understand this, you know,” he said. “I just can’t figure it out.”

  “Understand what?” Daniel asked, now impatiently.

  “This is just a little factory, I’m just a retired factory worker.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “What possible interest could a New York lawyer like you have in me, in my old job?” He laughed a bit sadly. Their two worlds were so far apart that any intersection seemed beyond belief.

  It would have been easy to explain. As Daniel was quickly learning, for decades, with almost no oversight, factories and corporations like Edward Bear had churned out deadly chemicals the names of which few Americans would be able to pronounce, much less identify, then poured these chemicals into streams and lakes, or paid haulers to take the contaminants to vast waste sites for indiscriminate dumping. When cows keeled over in the field, dandelions sprouted human faces, and children within a hundred mile radius of a waste dump grew three legs, the government stepped in, passing in fairly quick succession a variety of other complicated environmental laws with names like NEPA, CERCLA, RCRA and SARA.

  Suddenly, wealthy polluters faced the obligation to clean up quickly messes that had been decades in the making, which meant perhaps billions of dollars for environmental defense lawyers. With Edward Bear, Daniel had taken one small step towards cracking the market.

  To Mr. Connors, Daniel said, simply, “I represent Edward Bear. There’s nothing to worry about. Just tell me the truth.”

  For the next half hour Connors spoke in a calm voice as he related terrible experiences of thirty years of work at the town’s plastics factory. No emotion escaped him as he told Daniel about the time he’d lost an arm when byproducts of the plastics, which he was readying for dumping into the nearby river, splashed into the air; a small amount hit his sleeve and burned through to the bone.

  Another time, he said, he was driving home, suddenly blacked out and woke up by the side of the road. His car was overturned, his entire body had gone yellow.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Then, I was preparing some non-toxic chemicals for dumping, when I stepped in a puddle on the floor. My shoe went up in a hiss of steam and I lost three toes.”

  Daniel turned off the tape recorder.

  “Sorry,” he told Mr. Connors. “We’ll get back to this in a second. But just between the two of us. I just can’t help asking.”

  Mrs. Connors came in with the coffee. She served Daniel, smiling, then gave a cup to her husband.

  She then retreated to the kitchen.

  One time, Daniel went on, he’d quit a job because the commute was too long. Another time he’d quit a job because his office had a lousy view.

  “I know what you’re getting at,” Connors said. “It’s hard for a guy like you to understand.” He smiled. “Look, you have a nice lawyer’s suit, and you’re still relatively youngish for – ”

  He thought for a moment.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two,” Daniel said, lying. He was really thirty-six, and he didn’t know why he would lie about his age, today, all of a sudden.

  “A fairly youngish thirty-two,” Connors said. “When I was thirty-two, I was older than you by a decade.”

  He shook his head in disappointment.

  It would be hard, Connors went on, to explain it to a guy like Daniel, a guy in a lawyer’s suit who didn’t even really know what thirty-two meant to a person in a town like this. It would be very hard for Daniel to understand that the plant hadn’t been so bad. Was one arm and three toes so much to give for thirty years of security and a pension?

  “Softball games,” Connors said. “They set up softball games for us. It couldn’t be that they had such a bad heart. They set up picnics and softball tournaments. I mean, hitting got tough with one arm, though I could still pitch, and after I lost the toes it got hard to run to first base even if I did manage to bunt.” His face hardened. “But I got married and raised two kids, and that isn’t so bad. I don’t think I’m anyone to feel sorry for. I might not be the top of the heap, but I don’t live in Bhopal.”

  “Sorry,” Daniel said, feeling more nervous than sorry, and really quite surprised that Mr. Connors remembered Bhopal. “We’ll get back to the interview,” he said, and reached for the tape recorder.

  Connors shook his head. “Go back to your nice view and your convenient commute. I’m feeling tired, and I don’t have the energy to help you get your Chanukah bonus.”

  Daniel turned off Elm Street. He stepped out of the car, walked across a field
of yellow grass and leaned against the chain link fence. He lit up a cigarette and stared into the distance at the landfill and the bubbling marshes even further beyond, a great hopeless green ocean. A family of deer at the edge of the dump munched on chemical byproducts. They ate until their faces turned black, and then their ears twisted about and they ran off in fright. On the other side of the landfill ten-year-old boys were running and laughing in this industrial playground probably only because their parents had told them never, ever to play there. One fell headlong into capitalism’s shit, and the others taunted him.

  Daniel turned and walked back to his car. Chanukah bonus.

  Back in New York, Daniel parked in the garage and went our to the street to hail a cab back to work. A man on the street called him an asshole fascist racist fascist Jew murderer. The windows of his apartment gazed down at him, his sad, empty two-bedroom on the 13th floor, with a nice view of the city and car noises in the middle of the night, which might have been a problem except that it all reminded him of the ocean, of listening to the ocean in the middle of the night in the beach-house his parents had owned back when middle class people still owned beach-houses.

  The cab let him off on Wall Street, and he walked one block to the skyscraper that housed the labyrinthine headquarters of Johnson & Tierney. He walked through the polished, sunlit lobby, into the wood paneled elevator and up in the blink of an eye to the 24th floor. He made his way down the hallway; the carpeting always put a little spring into his otherwise thuddingly sullen steps – on his daily journeys to the men’s room, back to the office, to the library, back to the office.

  He walked past the coffee machine, past the collection of original art that lined the walls along Daniel’s men’s room route, past the men’s room itself, past the framed photograph of the firm’s surviving founding partner, Robinson Tierney, shaking hands with President Reagan, both of them smiling.

  Daniel paused for a moment, surveying Mr. Tierney’s face, so framed by the wrinkles and scars of the years and collected wisdom. Daniel could still muster a weary hatred for Tierney, who now came into the office a few days each week, wandered around, harassed people, doddered. He hated Tierney’s voice, his walk, his supercilious manner. He supposed he also pettily resented Tierney’s success and power, but his excuse for his hatred was more noble: the firm, after all, had gained prominence by representing the government of Adolph Hitler during its early years. Mr. Johnson and his youthful prodigy Mr. Tierney had lobbied Washington to support Germany against Russia, arguing that Socialism run amuck would destroy the moral fiber of the United States, while Nazism was at its core pro-business and almost wholly consistent with American patriotism. Daniel found it hard to imagine that Mr. Tierney’s sympathies had changed much over the years, despite his grudging acceptance of U.S. civil rights legislation.

  The firm had built its reputation on international business deals, back when nationalism raged and the barriers were almost insurmountable, and today Johnson & Tierney was larger and more esteemed than ever, hundreds of attorneys supervising globe-spanning transactions or court disputes with millions of dollars at stake. So many attorneys; it was impossible to recognize them all. Any white man in a suit could wander the hallways of Johnson & Tierney for months without being noticed. So many forgotten white men in suits had wandered these hallways: men like William Granville, who studied law at Harvard University, joined the firm in 1941, then mysteriously died seven months later; or Roger Powell, a graduate of Andover, Harvard College, and Columbia Law School, who joined the firm in 1951, left after one year and went on to become the chief operating officer of the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank; or Maurice MacDuffie, an associate at the firm from 1960 through 1961, who then put in two decades as a respected investment adviser but at the time of his death in 1986 was under investigation by the Securities & Exchange Commission for alleged violations of the uptick rule. Mr. MacDuffie allegedly sold short while his stock was falling, ensuring the market’s continuing deflation while guaranteeing Mr. MacDuffie a profit. He died before responding to the allegations.

  Two J&T associates employed at the firm on that chilly Wednesday near the end of the 1980s also were soon to leave, one in a coffin, one under threat of arrest: Henry, a handsome recovering alcoholic on the verge of partnership; and Emmett, the little boy frightened by Stephen Solomon’s nothing-face, who’d now grown into a pudgy junior associate with a friendly, unassuming manner. Henry and Emmett had nothing in common beyond a spectacular, shocking departure – indeed, given that Henry was litigation and Emmett corporate, they would never even meet – but both, on that chilly Wednesday, would decline to eat dinner with Daniel.

  Emmett was the twenty-eight year old corporate associate who occupied the office immediately adjacent to Daniel’s, and with whom Daniel occasionally ate dinner in the firm’s cafeteria, sharing a few strained laughs over pasta with sun-dried tomatoes. While Daniel was driving back from the Edward Bear factory, Emmett was working busily on a merger, looking through documents, company financial statements, trying to catch anything unusual, suspicious. At five, he called Katherine at her office. He shared a few work anecdotes with her: first, a story about the partner who’d made an amusing, risqué slip-of-the-tongue in a meeting with clients. Then he gave Katherine the latest word on the young female lawyer who’d been working closely with him on a now-stalled merger, one of a surprisingly large number of female associates who, Emmett believed, pursued him shamelessly and incorrigibly in extremely subtle ways; today, as usual, Emmett told Katherine, her humorous, hopeless, feckless efforts had again met with no response whatsoever.

  Emmett let the depth of his faithfulness sink in, then gave Katherine the good news: Nothing urgent was happening. He was ahead of schedule, for once. For the first time in months, he said, he would be home for dinner. He would not be eating in the firm cafeteria, charging dinner to some client’s account.

  His wife practically purred over the phone. “I just had this feeling,” she said. “Somehow, I knew it. I bought something for dinner yesterday just in case.” she said. He asked what, and she said it would be a surprise. Something expensive, she said. Emmett stared at their wedding picture as he spoke to her on the telephone; smiled down at Katherine, her eyes wide and full of joy, her curly blond hair blowing about in the wind that swirled off the Hudson River. He could almost see her lips move. That was Katherine at her prettiest; since then, her good cooking had kept them noticeably rounder, but that was just the manifestation of an inner comfort for which Emmett had always yearned.

  She loved him, Katherine said in a low whisper, so her co-workers in the adjoining cubicles could not hear, and he said that he loved her. He looked out at the Statue of Liberty, and the sailboats drifting by.

  An hour later, when Daniel stepped lightly into Emmett’s office to ask for some companionship in the firm’s cafeteria, where the special of the day was Cajun meat loaf with garlic sauce, Emmett spoke with a good deal of passion about his wife’s wonderful cooking. He turned to the window, staring over the water in the general direction of his apartment building, and he smiled.

  “Emmett, my friend,” Daniel said softly, sitting down in front of the younger associate’s desk. “What is your goal in life, Emmett, your deepest, most heartfelt ambition?”

  “Stay off the front page of the New York Post,” Emmett said without a thought.

  “How about dinner?”

  “A small but worthy goal, I think,” Emmett said, “but I’d like to think I’m slightly more ambitious than that.” His voice was filled with resignation: “Actually, guess not. Wonder what I’m doing here.” After a pause, he added, “Thanks, Daniel, but I think I’ll manage to get home for dinner tonight. See the wife for a change.”

  “So you are declining?”

  He was declining, Emmett agreed with a nod. Leaving Daniel high and dry, so to speak. Daniel suddenly felt tremendous envy for Emmett, for his early evening, for his wife and the meal that awaited him at home. Daniel pict
ured Emmett in an armchair, smiling at his wife. Then Daniel pictured himself in the firm’s dining room, sitting beneath fluorescent lights at the very end of a table of nervously laughing associates, balding, paunched, white Protestants, blue-eyed, blond-haired, cuff-linked, arrogant defenders of the moneyed interests. There in the lunchroom, sharing a meal with these associates, as always Daniel would want to spin out of his body, to watch himself as others might see him, surrounded by such people, laughing weakly – tonight, would anyone finally notice the obvious, that Daniel hated them all, that he found them all unamusing, tedious? – drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette as he held back a cough – Daniel, dark-haired, always a little bit unshaven, non-Aryan Daniel, keeping his temper in check, always angry at perceived slights, at country-club gentility, at the racism that he thought he saw in every blue-eyed glance.

  “I sometimes wish,” Daniel said absently, “that this entire place would just burn down.” (And the attorneys who worked between floors 11 and 25 at 15 Wall Street would, for just a few moments, know what it felt like to melt.)

  Emmett laughed. Steady Emmett, level Emmett. Happy Emmett, with a happy wife at home, awaiting him with oven mitts. Was it not true that every man, after a twelve-hour workday, secretly, guiltily fantasized about returning home to Donna Reed? Normal, steady, happy Emmett. Neither Emmett nor Daniel then realized, of course, that one day, after his departure from the firm, this shrinking fellow who, it was true, craved nothing more than quiet commonness would become one of the legends of Johnson & Tierney, one of those notorious former employees about whom current employees whisper. Oddly, two months after his last day at work, most people would barely remember Emmett himself. No one would really know where he had gone, though there would be some talk; people would talk. He always seemed so friendly, someone would say, staring in at Emmett’s office, but somehow I knew there was something underneath that – something so unsettling that he was hiding.