Sands Rising

by H M Wilhelmborn

  “Jonathan and Nathan,” I said. “But we call them ‘Jon’ and ‘Nate.’”

  “I’m Jonathan,” my son said, “and I’m four. He’s one. He’s Nathan, and he’s my brother.”

  “Well done, buddy!” Mauru patted Jon on the head.

  “So, Jonathan and Nathan, we want to create a world,” Mike said, “where you both have all the water you need.”

  “Thank you,” Jon said.

  “What about livestock rearing?” Mauru asked. “How much water is that and will you stop it? If you do, what about those of us who love a good porterhouse when we splurge a little?”

  “Well, that’s a fascinating one.” Granite nodded.

  (I’ll digress a little, but I need to. You know those people who are know-it-alls and who are also too beautiful to boot, with perfect teeth, perfect smiles, perfect eyebrows, perfect fingernails, perfect earrings, and the perfect boyfriend? You know, the ones whose perfection hides some depravity? Granite was one of them. I feel terrible saying these things, but I can’t help myself given what Granite later did to my family and me, which Linda Maywrot says I should keep for the next book.)

  Granite cleared her throat to make her voice even more perfect.

  “Well,” she said, “so much of the alfalfa grown in California goes to cattle. Alfalfa guzzles more water than any other crop.” Granite cleared her throat again for extra dramatic effect, which my Aunt Lucy calls “adding salt and pepper to the conversation.”

  “Beef,” Granite said, looking straight ahead as if she were about to command an army, “consumes around 2,000 gallons of water per pound. Pork: 500 gallons per pound. Chicken: over 400 gallons per pound.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Our ten minutes are just about up, but you’d never guess which household favorite loves water.”

  I might have rolled my eyes at her; I do not recall. (Linda Maywrot keeps telling me not to get distracted when recounting my story, but I can’t help it. “Just tell your story, Janet,” Linda says, “and leave the unnecessary snark out.”)

  “We’d never ban your favorite water guzzler, if you elected us.” Granite coughed after she said that. “You see, we’re all about listening to the needs of the people of California. As you’ve probably guessed, we are Californians fighting for the future of all Californians. We need your advice and help. Please join us.”

  “Uh, we, um, just met you,” I said in response. “My guess, though, for the household thingy that’s a water guzzler is coffee.”

  “That’s a great guess, Janet. A really great guess,” Mike said. “But it’s unfortunately not the biggest drinker, Janet.”

  “Chocolate,” Granite said with a smirk in response to her own question. “It’s chocolate. Two thousand five hundred gallons of water per pound of chocolate.”

  “So, no more chocolate?” Mauru smirked in return.

  “We won’t ban chocolate, but we’re looking at ways of deciding what California really needs in an era of increased water riots,” Granite said. “Sydney, Australia had its first water riots just two months ago—”

  “Yeah,” Mauru said. “In the Herald and on TV.”

  “The last thing we need,” Granite continued, “is water riots here when we can take the necessary steps now. It’s already way too much to deal with, given the dust storms and the price increases. Mauru, Janet, Nate, and Jon, thank you for your time. You’re such a beautiful family. With your permission, we’d like to check back in with you, update you on what we’ve learned, and tell you what we plan to bring before the voters of this great state in the next election. Would that be OK?”

  Mauru and I looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

  4

  I Can’t Forgive Eleena

  It had been at least ten years since I’d last seen her. I knew that her series of interviews had made her a household name, and they’d drawn a lot of people to the California Homeland Channel and the California Water Party.

  Her interviews hadn’t won her any accolades. I’d heard that she was still as devoted as ever to Anton Cola and Jeremiah Trehoviak of the CWP. Many people in San Diego wore T-shirts with her face on them, and below her face, the T-shirts bore the words, “I Can’t Forgive Eleena.”

  Why couldn’t people forgive her?

  Jon and Nate were asleep, and Mauru was reading a lengthy biography in the living room of Benjamin Franklin, which was about 950 pages in length.

  I’ve read some major tomes in my time.

  In jail, it’s about the only exciting thing you can do, and I’m only saying this to make my point about boring, long books. I recently read Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which the editor thinks is “a great work of fiction,” and I personally think it’s unbearably long.

  One hundred chapters.

  Eight hundred pages.

  Didn’t our warden know that we, the incarcerated in San Diego, California, the United States of America, preferred to read more recent novels by lesser-known writers? Couldn’t our warden order books by writers who depict the generalized suffering of the nobodies of our time, like me, rather than books portraying the follies of the rich?

  Couldn’t our warden have ordered romances by Ambrosia Skiffles? Didn’t our warden know that some of us would never erase from our memories Trollope’s uninspired opening line to The Way We Live Now: “Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend . . .”

  I asked Linda Maywrot if I should begin my own book, Sands Rising, with something like: “Let the reader be introduced to Master Jonathan Whitaker Virdis, upon whose thoughtfulness some of this august story turns.”

  Linda Maywrot stared at me and said, “Unwise, Janet.”

  I’ll give Trollope one thing though: his delightful family name. As for Trollope’s final two sentences, however, they are some of the most mind-numbing lines in all of literature.

  “There had been no hesitation in the laying on of the paint. At that last meeting, Lady Carbury had been very soft, very handsome, and very winning . . .”

  “I can tell you one thing,” I said to Linda Maywrot, who smiled at me as if at someone who was already losing her marbles in jail. “I won’t be ending Sands Rising with, ‘There can be no hesitation that the paint of the San Diego County Jail walls bored Janet to death as she waited for a verdict by ballot. At last, Janet Whitaker Virdis, a very soft, very handsome, very winning woman from Cortland, New York regretted the choices she had made in San Diego, California, United States of America.’”

  Linda Maywrot raised her eyebrows and said, “At least Trollope got a smile out of you, Janet. You haven’t smiled in a while.”

  “Babe,” I said to Mauru as he read the biography of Benjamin Franklin, “if you just let me choose your books for you like you let me choose your underwear, I’d choose some really great titles, whose authors know that if you can say it 950 pages, you can just as easily say it in half that.”

  “Some of us like to draw things out.” Mauru sneezed and excused himself. “We like side stories and diversions, Jan. We like to know every last detail, and we like to lose ourselves in a good book. Not everyone wants something to be over just as it’s beginning to rise in potential. Remember that’s also why, before we had kids, I didn’t watch a movie that was less than 110 minutes long.”

  “Well,” I responded, “I still don’t get why you don’t accept books as gifts.”

  “It’s kind of a personal thing, Jan. There’s nothing more personal than a book. I’d more easily accept, say, your underwear choices than a book. Underwear is external. You know, it sort of doesn’t matter, which is why you’ll never hear of banned underwear, but you’ll always hear of banned books. With a book, you’re telling someone you want to affect their internal worldview, you want to change them. I’ve never understood why anyone would accept such a radical gift from anyone.”

  “That’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard, Mauru,” I said. “And you’re a teacher
to boot. How do you ever expect to be challenged if you remain in your little mental enclosure, where you police all the printed materials coming in? It’s like a little censorship thing you’ve got going on there. I don’t want our kids to pick up on it—”

  “They’ll pick up on what they’ll pick up on, babe.” He winked. “We’re both doing our best. I know it’s different, my relationship with my books. You can buy me underwear, you can buy me clothes. Just don’t buy me books. I’m a grown man. I can think for myself.”

  I shrugged.

  While I didn’t buy any books for Mauru, I strategically placed all the books I thought he should read around the condo, including a few Ambrosia Skiffles romances to spice things up between us every so often. Mauru smiled sometimes, pretended not to see them most of the time, and once he asked me to stop dropping “obvious hints” about his reading preferences, especially since he didn’t have a very high opinion of my taste in romance novels.

  He knew that my favorite romance novel, written by Ambrosia Skiffles, opens with the following sentences, which he thought silly but I loved: “As she opened the scandalous lingerie gift with her smooth and tender fingers, Bella felt something firm inside the gift box and, surprised, wondered what it might be. Daniel kissed the little hairs on the back of Bella’s neck, and she cooed in approval. His phone went off. His wife was on the line.”

  “Whatever,” I said to Mauru. “You enjoy your Benjamin Franklin, and I’ll enjoy my Ambrosia.”

  Mauru looked up at the TV screen and continued reading his biography. I asked him if he minded me watching TV while he read. He winked at me.

  I smiled. The banner at the top of the screen said the episode was a rerun.

  Eleena.

  There she was, back on the California Homeland Channel.

  I smiled as I remembered fragments of her story. She seemed much older now. Her voice was as striking as ever, and she smiled with some effort, almost as if the news had gotten back to her that people in San Diego wore T-shirts saying they couldn’t forgive her.

  “I remember it all,” Eleena said, “because we stopped wearing white clothing. Everything became dusty, Anton. You know, the red dust almost like paprika?”

  Mauru set his biography on the side table.

  “Did you have any floods at all in the Southern African Federation?” Anton asked her.

  Eleena shook her head. “Not where I lived, Anton. We had floods a few years ago, but nothing like London, Miami, or other cities like that.”

  Eleena’s voice trailed into the silence, and she dropped her head. She looked pensive now.

  “The Hatred has been here for about three years. You see a lot in a lifetime, Anton. My husband, Nirav, and I married in 1992. A year later, our only child, Mable, was born. They don’t tell you that the best part of being a parent is being a witness. If you do your job well, you witness all the landmarks in your child’s life, and if you’re lucky, your child is there to witness your final landmark: your death.”

  “Where is Mable now?” Anton asked.

  “Shh!” Mauru said to the TV screen. “Can’t you see she’s in the middle of a thought?”

  “I killed her,” Eleena said. “I killed my daughter.”

  Eleena dropped her head, shut her eyes, and groaned in such a way that it seemed like she was summoning her past and reviving all its demons so that they would expunge her sins.

  “Why did you kill her?” Anton asked.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Mauru said, “Stop interrupting her! What’s up with this guy?”

  “You don’t just decide to kill your child, Anton,” Eleena responded. “Can you understand that I loved my daughter and didn’t mean to kill her? She was beautiful; your organization would have dressed her in one of your uniforms, and she would have looked like a model. She was intelligent. She received her degree in environmental science, and she helped write . . . Anyway, it’s all in the past now. I accept the consequences of my choice, Anton. As Mr. Trehoviak teaches us, we choose the consequences when we choose the action.”

  I wondered what had happened and felt nauseous, so I stood up and walked to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth, flossed, and gargled with mouthwash. I rinsed my mouth and returned to sit beside Mauru, who held me close.

  “Want to change the channel, babe?”

  I shook my head.

  “What did she do?” I asked Mauru. “And why does the Water Party have her on their channel? She’s making us, the children of immigrants, look bad, like we’re capable of this killing stuff, you know, right here in our own country.”

  “My husband,” Eleena said, “died from cerebral malaria, Anton. He’d spent many years in malarial zones, but he still got really sick and became jaundiced. There he was, yellow, like, like papaya, like a lemon, and he was dying. We’d traveled the world together. We’d had a child together.”

  Eleena held her head in her hands.

  “Delirium, they called it.” She looked straight into the camera. “You know what your husband does when he’s delirious? He forgets not only who he is but also who you are. You cease to exist for him. An entire life and its memories are wiped away. Extinct. Then he dies as you watch.”

  “How did you kill Mable, Eleena?” Anton asked.

  “It was unintentional, Anton. Why does no one believe me? Mable was researching malaria in a remote part of the country we call ‘the Lowveld.’ The Lowveld is a mosquito-ridden area, but Mable’s degree sent her to places like that. She’d met her husband many years before in such a place. As I’ve said before, our great misfortune in this part of the world is to have had leaders who seek power, not responsibility.”

  Eleena appeared pensive. It was as if her mind were a vast library, and she awaited the delivery of the exact volume she sought from the stacks before she continued speaking.

  “We had one such president, the one before this one—equally dangerous and rotten—who spent more time jetting abroad than he did paying attention to the environmental disaster at home. We called him ‘Vasco da Gama’ because he was more interested in travel than in attending to problems here at home. The Lowveld, where Mable lived and worked, is an arid and hot area with the occasional thunderstorm. Your organization, the California Water Party, has been trucking potable water there now for many years and . . .”

  Eleena stopped, sniffled, wiped her nose, and shook her head. She turned away from the camera. In the manner of those who have lived a thousand years and have seen it all, she shook her head again.

  “I was part of a group,” Eleena said, “a small group of concerned citizens that you may have heard of, called—what does it even matter now? We wanted to get our government to act for the environment, for us, for our future. We decided to sabotage your water convoy to the Lowveld because we knew that the president’s wife was due to spend the weekend there. She was to give a meaningless speech about how much the government cared about the environment. We knew that she’d have about ninety to one hundred security personnel with her, and they wouldn’t be able to take enough water for all those people, so they’d depend on the water convoy.”

  “But your daughter, Mable, lived there. Right?” Anton asked.

  “Yes, but I also love my country, Anton. We would at least have made our point: to finally make the government pay attention.”

  “What happened to Mable, Eleena?” Anton asked.

  “I’m not a coward,” Eleena said as she avoided the question. “I’m not like this younger generation that feels entitled to everything, perpetually victimized, and that believes itself consistently worthy of everyone’s else’s pity or praise. I’m not searching for recognition or forgiveness. I’m just an example of what needs to be done when circumstances change, and the context requires us to act in ways we could never have anticipated.

  “We attacked the water convoy as it descended into the Lowveld. All water supplies were lost, two weeks’ worth, which is what we wanted, especially since the president’s wife had arrived
in the area the night before. What we hadn’t anticipated was that, in attacking the convoy on the only road into and out of the Lowveld, we might also put at risk those leaving the Lowveld, whom we didn’t expect to be on the road at that hour.

  “The first truck tried to turn around and crashed into a minivan leaving the Lowveld. That car had Mable, her husband, and a friend of theirs in it. The crash killed them, including the twins Mable was carrying. They were coming to the capital to surprise me for my birthday. It happened around 2:30 a.m.”

  Eleena wiped her eyes and sniffled.

  Mauru stared at me.

  Eleena was shaking her head again.

  “Eleena,” Anton said, “was it worth making a point?”

  “We heard of the first cases of what everyone calls The Hatred,” Eleena continued as she tried to focus again, “around the time Nirav died.”

  Eleena hummed her song again as if she needed to focus on something other than the interview to get through it.

  “It takes the boys,” Eleena told Anton. “The Hatred takes the boys, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Our government was doing nothing about it. Nothing. We heard of our first lady going on shopping trips abroad, buying herself multi-million-dollar homes, assaulting people who questioned her, and she was also talking of running for office. Her children were showing off the carcasses of endangered animals they’d slaughtered, the luxury cars they’d purchased, the jewelry they’d designed, and the movies they’d made about their lavish lifestyle. They did this while people starved and while my husband, Nirav, died of malaria. How, therefore, do you make a point except by making a point, Anton?”