1
IMPENDING DOOM IN THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
The skies open as if a seam has torn. Rain strafes the silt loam fields and hanging dogwoods of Central Mississippi. It slashes windows, streets and parking lots and floods cypress swamps. Rain surges all morning until an icy wind hardens it to sleet and, by afternoon, a swirling, greasy snow.
Snow in Central Mississippi? In March? Confused students scurry across campus, backpacks covering heads. Classes are canceled, departmental meetings, sporting events—everything is put on hold. Streets, parking lots and sidewalks empty. Then in the afternoon, it stops, and the campus is eerie and quiet, a premonition.
During this short break in the storm, three strangers set out on separate treks across the cold, unforgiving expanse of campus. By end of day, they will be pushed to the edge, made to face oblivion together in the same refuge.
The first, Anna Molson, is replaying a job interview she just completed—wondering aloud to her sister if it went as badly as she thinks, or if this is just more of her midlife pessimism, this sense of doom she has about the world, and about what once would have been called her “prospects.” She just turned thirty-seven. After six years in the Arctic, her longtime boyfriend is encouraging her to find a job back in the States so they can have a baby. Her parents are encouraging her to freeze her eggs. Even now, Anna’s sister is encouraging her to “get a younger hairstyle.”
Anna Molson isn’t sure how much more encouragement she can take.
“So, you don’t think you got it?” her FaceTiming sister is asking.
Anna holds up her phone and stares into her sister’s face as she hurries across campus. “I don’t see how,” she says. “And this felt like my last chance.”
“I know it feels like that, but it’s not.” Claire is feeding her daughter, Anna’s niece, shoveling tiny spoons of mashed sweet potatoes, like coal into a furnace. “Maybe you should just move home without the job. Get pregnant and see what happens.”
Anna laughs. “I have a pretty good idea what happens.”
On-screen, her sister laughs, too. She leans forward and squints. “Seriously, though, Anna, what have you done with your hair?”
“Nothing!”
“Right. Like . . . ever?”
“It’s humid here! And it’s been storming all day!” Anna holds up the phone for Claire to see the wall of black clouds behind her. On cue, the wind picks up and the sleet starts to come down again. “In fact, here it comes again. I gotta go.”
For just a moment, in the bottom of her iPhone screen, a tiny figure appears, a man walking behind her, the storm above him like a giant kite.
Rowan Eastman is a scruffy thirty-eight and might be forgiven for suspecting ownership of that black cloud. Raised by a single, mercurial mother, Rowan grew up believing disaster was just a gin and tonic away. Even now, as he listens to hold music on his own phone, Rowan has a powerful sense memory: at seven, walking home in a snowstorm after his drunk mother crashed their car. Rowan had just read a book about avalanches, and he worried the snow would bury them. “Aw, you read too much, Rowie,” his mother said. Then she made him stick out his tongue. “See, we can eat our way home.” Thirty years later, walking alone across the Mississippi State University campus, Rowan opens his mouth again. Flakes melt on his boozy tongue.
The airline hold music continues to play in his ear, and Rowan adapts the shapeless melody to a Johnny Cash song he’s been humming all day, a song from the stack of country-western albums that was the only remnant of his father by the time Rowan was old enough to know that he was supposed to have a mom and a dad.
“They’re bound to get you,” he sings now, as the snow picks up its pace again. “They got a curfew . . . and you go to the . . . Starkville city jail.”
The third person is just leaving his apartment. Jeremiah Ellis is a twenty-year-old college junior late for his work-study job at the Butler Guest House. Jeremiah thought about skipping altogether because of the storm, but he needs the money, and anyway, he hasn’t skipped anything since sixth grade Sunday school. So, he zips up his coat and tells his roommate the disturbing news he’s just received: there is an emergency meeting tomorrow for Spectrum, the campus gay and lesbian group that he joined three weeks ago. There, Jeremiah must decide how to vote on a big issue: whether the group should go forward with its plan to stage the first-ever MSU Pride Parade, despite the fact that the reactionary Starkville town council has just rejected their permit.
“Yikes,” his roommate Garren says, game controller falling to his lap. “How you gonna vote?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremiah says. “I’ve only been out for three weeks. It would suck to get arrested for it so soon.”
Garren nods. “What’d you expect, though, man? I mean, who moves to Mississippi to be gay?”
Jeremiah laughs and zips up his coat. He starts for the door but pauses for Garren to say that thing he’s begun saying whenever Jeremiah leaves the apartment. “Hey, be careful out there.”
And with that, Jeremiah steps into the tempest.
As this once-in-a-century storm strafes Mississippi’s Golden Triangle, these three strangers lean into the same icy wind, deep in their own thoughts and engaged in the endless human struggle to keep moving forward in the face of certain cataclysm.
It’s like Rowan Eastman’s mother said years earlier, after driving their car into the ditch: “Aw, stop crying, kid. It ain’t the end of the world.”
But . . .
What if it is?
2
INTREPID SCIENTIST ANNA MOLSON MUST WARN THE PRESIDENT
Wind howls, snow swirls, and Anna Molson rushes toward the Student Union Building, where a young man holds the door. “Best get out that storm, ma’am.”
She steps inside and shakes the sleet from her coat. “Thank you.”
“Crazy-ass weather,” the student says.
“Yes,” she says. “It is.” All day, people in Starkville have been saying how unseasonal the weather is. How crazy-ass. It is something she, of all people, doesn’t need to be told.
And it’s not just the snow. The high today in Starkville is thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. (Or, as she would record it in her professional life: 3.33333 Celsius.) At the Tiksi Arctic International Hydrometeorological Observatory, where, until recently, Anna has been monitoring permafrost data and reading Scandinavian mystery novels, the high today is also, coincidentally, 3.33333 Celsius. (On the Fahrenheit scale, a mind-boggling forty-eight degrees above average.)
The same temperature in the Arctic and in Mississippi? In March? No wonder folks can’t get their minds around what’s happening. Anna imagines a spaceship hovering over campus, vaporizing buildings with lasers, the locals looking at one another: Well, that’s unseasonal. Of course, words are destined to fail compared to hard data. Alarming? Catastrophic? Crazy-ass? If only there were a word as precise as 3.33333—those threes going off into infinity, irreversible, into the endless nothingness of space.
Anna looks around the Student Union Building: twenty kids wait out the storm bent over laptops, buried under headphones.
Sometimes, when she returns to the States like this, Anna has the urge to grab people and shake them from their stupors. Don’t you see what’s happening? Melting polar ice, deforestation, acidifying oceans, calving glaciers, sea levels rising, epochal floods and storms, mass extinctions, ancient diseases released from the permafrost. A complete collapse of delicate environmental systems on every level. Not in some hazy future—now! Just look at the news: hurricane follows hurricane on the East Coast as the West burns and coral reefs die and island nations slide into the sea. Anna has the urge to yell at strangers (Who cares who won The Bachelor!) or her sister (You want me to get bangs?) or her parents (Freeze my eggs?). Back in civilization she always gets the urge to scream at a whole distracted world.
At times like this she feels like the intrepid scientist in an old disaster movie, the one nobody ever listens to: Mr. President, if my calculations are correct—
In the Student Union Building, Anna gets coffee. Starbucks is, unsurprisingly, the only thing open in this storm: commerce’s cockroach. She sits at an open table.
A moment later a bearded man about her age plops down at the table next to her, hands on either side of his cup. He holds it up in a friendly toast.
She tips her own cup in response.
“Guessin’ y’all ain’t from Starkville,” the man says.
No, she says, she is from Oregon, here interviewing for a job.
The man nods. He has glassy brown eyes and thick facial hair that goes too high on his cheeks. She puts him five minutes of grooming from being handsome.
“And how was it?” he asks, his drawl thick and drippy, making the words run together—Anhowwadit.
“The interview? It was okay.” In fact, it was exhausting, awful: meetings with the handful of faculty and students who braved the rain, and, an hour ago, a stressful final interview with an associate dean eager to get home before the storm got any worse. After noting her lack of teaching experience, he closed her file and said, “Thanks for coming down. Have a safe flight home.” And that was it, prospects doomed, interview over, except for a pro forma dinner later tonight with some professors—assuming they don’t cancel because of the weather.
“English Lit?” the scruffy man guesses.
“Hydrology,” she says, and explains that, until ten days ago, she was working on field research projects in the Arctic, in Greenland and in Russia. She’s here interviewing for an assistant professorship in the Geosciences Department.
“That so?” He smiles. “A climate scientist? Well.” He leans sideways toward her table, confiding, “Don’t try convincin’ folks down here that the planet’s heatin’ up . . . long as we freezin’ our asses off.”
Anna smiles, and for the six-thousandth time, explains that an overheated planet will manifest itself in many ways, polar areas warming, temperate areas seeing an increase in storm patterns. She forgets sometimes how to talk normal human being. “It’s common,” she says, “mistaking weather for climate. Weather simply reflects climate in a certain time and place.”
“A certain time and place,” he says, “I like that. Yeah, that’s good.” He pulls a flask from an interior pocket in his jacket and holds it up, eyebrows rising with it.
“No, thank you,” Anna says.
He shrugs and pours a healthy shot into his own cup of coffee. “Mind if I ask another question—”
She shrugs. What the hell.
“Something I always wanted to ask one-a-you climate zealots—”
She doesn’t flinch at the word.
The man leans in conspiratorially, narrows his wet eyes. “How long we got?”
She laughs, surprising herself with the bitterness of the sound. Stupid. What’s she supposed to say? Five years? Five thousand? In geological time, it’s the difference between a quarter second and a half second.
“Eleven years, four months, two days,” she says.
He points at her with his coffee cup. “That’s good. But, what, ninety-seven percent-a-you-all believe the world is doomed, right?”
She doesn’t bother correcting him. This focus on end-of-civilization scenarios is silly, people imagining it will be like an adventure movie, everyone starring in their own apocalyptic single-shooter game. These are wildly complex systems on the verge of sudden, epochal change. And while a tiny percentage of scientists might argue that human activity isn’t the primary cause, none would debate that the rise in greenhouse gases and corresponding global temperature is going to have devastating effects on human civilization. That it already has.
“Okay, here’s my real question.” The man leans in. “If that’s the case, why do y’all even go to work? Why not just empty out all-a-y’all’s bank accounts, get a bunch-a-cocaine, rent a suite in Vegas, and go out in a big ol’ science orgy?”
Anna smiles. “I take it you’ve never been to a climate conference.”
The man’s eyes sparkle. “Why, you’re funny, Dr.—”
She offers her hand. “Anna Molson.”
He shakes it. “Seriously, Dr. Anna Molson. Why go on measurin’ raindrops and countin’ whales and all that shit when these people”—he gestures around the Student Union—“don’t care one whit, and you know damn well it’s probably too late? I mean, don’t y’all sometimes ask yourself: Why go on?”
It surprises Anna how much this question stings. Like a trapdoor has given way in her chest.
Among climate scientists, it’s called “pre-traumatic stress disorder” but the feelings are no joke: anger, hopelessness, depression, panic—a recurring nightmare in which you see the tsunami on the horizon but can’t convince anyone to leave the beach. She knows scientists who have become drunks, who have dropped out and moved to the desert, who have committed suicide.
Does she sometimes ask herself, Why go on?
No. She asks herself that question every single day.
Anna lets out a deep breath. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Rowan,” he says, “Rowan Eastman.”
“Well, Rowan Eastman. May I?” She gestures at his jacket.
It takes him a second to understand. “Oh, sure,” he says, and he produces the MSU flask, flips it expertly like a Boy Scout handing over a knife.
She pours some whiskey in her coffee. Then a little more. More. She takes a sip. Better. She is surprised to have been so rattled by his question. Maybe it’s just the condescending misery of today’s job interview. (Thanks for coming down. Have a safe flight home.) Well. Screw you, associate asshole dean. Screw you, Mississippi, screw you, impending doom, pre-traumatic stress disorder, bangs and blizzards, and frozen eggs, thawing ice caps, screw it all! That’s what this improvised Irish coffee tastes like—a warm cup of screw you.
“Can I tell you about the first project I worked on?”
Rowan nods.
“Before arriving in Greenland, I imagined I’d be studying somewhat fixed systems—you know, sun is hot, ice is cold, glacial thinning is linear and predictable. But right away, we observed something strange. The Jakobshavn glacier was melting even in the winter, with temperatures still well below freezing.
“We worked with NASA for two years, outfitting an old DC-3 to drop probes all over the ice. Pretty soon we had our answer.” She holds up her coffee cup. “Warm water was coming from underneath, melting the glacier from below, the way a warm drink might melt ice cubes. Human activity had not only raised temperatures; it had rerouted ocean currents, meaning that even our most pessimistic estimates were off. Three meters of rising sea levels we expected to take eighty years . . . might take half that time. So, Rowan Eastman, you ask how many years we have left?
“None. It’s happening . . . right . . . now.” She waits for this to land. “And I realized something working on that project.” Anna stares past him. “This profession I was in? The better I did it—the worse it was going to be.”
Rowan just stares at her. The hum of the Student Union Building is the only sound for a while.
Anna smiles. “Do you know what it was called, that project?”
Rowan shakes his head.
“Ocean Melts Greenland.”
Rowan laughs. “OMG. That’s funny.” And, after a moment, he says, “Mind if I ask another question?”
“Is it going to be as cheerful as the last one?”
He smiles. “Why Mississippi?”
“You don’t mess around,” she says. Her parents asked the same thing, dripping with Pacific Northwest condescension—as if Mississippi were the backwater of all backwaters, as if there wasn’t ignorance in places like Oregon, too. In fact, sometimes the smug self-satisfaction of Portland (I am saving the planet in my brand-new Tesla) is the worst thing she can imagine.
“A boyfriend,” she says. “Salvaging a relationship.” Like she and Bashir were a shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic. They got together in grad school—two people convinced they could maintain a long-distance relationship while continuing their important, separate work on different continents. With so much time apart, they came to a tacit understanding: fidelity without militancy. Anna pictures it as a formula balancing basic integrity with the need for intimacy. Bashir calls it the Molson-Reed Axiom to the Golden Rule (Don’t Do Unto Others Unless You Absolutely Can’t Help It, and If You Do Unto Others, Use a Condom).
For six years, they pulled off this arrangement while making the most of the weeks they spent together. They exchanged old-fashioned letters and grew adept at Skype sex. (Him: “You’re freezing.” Her: “Yes, I’m naked in a Quonset hut on a glacier.” Him: “No. I mean, on-screen, you’re freezing.”)
In Greenland and Russia, she indulged a few work crushes, drunken kisses, fumbling with two senior researchers, one man and one woman—but she was pleased not to have disrupted the basic Anna Molson-Bashir Reed Axiom, or the box of condoms underneath her bunk. She assumed similar behavior on Bashir’s part. But he was working at the Sea Level Solutions Center at Florida International University, and Miami apparently offered more temptations than were found in her assorted Arctic weather postings. Finally, he admitted he’d been sleeping with someone. In fact, he’d been sleeping with several someones. “In fact . . .”
“Yeah, I get it,” Anna told him.
Bashir insisted these flings were not what he wants but were simple acts of loneliness. Frustrated dread over the very thing they always talked about—having their important work ignored by the world. Bashir doesn’t want those other women. She is the one he wants. In fact, he wants her to move home and have a baby. Now.
Oh, the existential ache of those particular words—home and baby and now. Where is home? When is now? Babies? Future? Give up a job she once saw as a calling to work on a relationship that suddenly feels so insecure—in Miami of all places, where in the coming decades, flooding will create two million refugees?
So, a compromise: she told Bashir she would look for a teaching job in the States, something close to him. And he would stop doing unto others and they would talk about starting a family.
Anna finds herself surprised that she has told the bearded man this whole sordid story. “And so,” she says, “here I am.”
“Here you are,” Rowan says. “In a certain time and place.”
She smiles. “Yes, interviewing for a job in Mississippi because it’s as close as I could get to my shit boyfriend in Florida.”
“It’s like a country song,” Rowan says. “Movin’ to Starkville for the man what cheated on ya.”
Anna laughs. “Or maybe coming to Mississippi is my version of running off to Vegas and blowing all my money on cocaine.”
“You forgot the orgy part,” says Rowan.
“No, I didn’t,” Anna says.
Something shifts between them. Neither one looks away. Finally, Rowan Eastman swallows and holds up the flask. “Another?”
“May as well,” she says and hands over her cup. “There’s no way I’m going to get this job anyway. Apparently, they interviewed some guy with twice as much teaching experience as me.”
The man with the beard finishes pouring the last of the whiskey into their cups. He waves the empty flask. “Yeah, we-e-e-ell—” He stretches the word out, speaking now without any trace whatsoever of that Mississippi drawl. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that guy.”
3
ROWAN EASTMAN SURVIVES AND SCAVENGES FOR FOOD
Rowan had made it through the formal interviews with faculty and staff. He’d survived the apologetic tour of Starkville (“We just got sushi”) and the underfunded Geosciences Department. He’d met the undergrads (earnest, lumpish), the grad students (harried, cynical), and then had a requisite dinner with his potential colleagues (“Sorry, we can’t put alcohol on the university credit card.”).
The faculty dinner was at a restaurant called Commander Cole’s on the edge of the Cotton District, a neighborhood of old sharecropper shacks and plantation houses disturbingly transformed into student housing.
His dinner companions that night were an old-school geology prof and an attractive, cheerful woman who taught meteorological broadcasting. “Dr. Weather Girl” she called herself, explaining in her fetching drawl that she taught students how to stand in front of green screens and “talk tornado.”
Dr. Weather Girl also brought her boyfriend, an English professor and sulking novelist with two last names, something like Anderson Henderson or Dickerson Gunderson. The novelist kept one hand on Dr. Weather Girl at all times and watched Rowan with suspicion, as if he was afraid Rowan might steal his cheerful girlfriend—which made Rowan want to get the job so he could steal the novelist’s cheerful girlfriend.
Still, he survived every indignity—faculty, students, department dinner, even Dr. Weather Girl and Norman Mailing-It-In—without screwing up, without offending anyone, without indulging his smart-ass self-destructive self.
Then, the next morning, in his last interview, with an officious associate dean, Rowan blew the whole thing. They were talking about Rowan’s recent project on declining whale birth rates when the associate dean muttered that he didn’t want to bring in “a climate zealot.”
“Zealot?” Rowan said before he could stop himself. “What’s that mean?”
Stupid. He knew what it meant. The word was a test to see if he could abide some harmless Mississippi backwardness. The students at MSU were no doubt as bright (and as dim) as kids from Connecticut and California, but some would need to be brought along slowly. (No, Zebidiah, according to carbon dating and, well, everything, the world is a bit older than six thousand years.) If he got his dander up over a little snake handling or the Ten Commandments or the worship of AK-47s or a phrase like climate zealot, he could no doubt make trouble for this dean.
Rowan tried to save the ball from going out of bounds. “Hey, I’m here to teach science, not political science.” But it was too late. He’d blown it. Like always. And he needed this job. He’d left a tenure-track position at UMass in 2012 to go to work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, studying the effects of warming seawater on northeastern whale populations. He measured acidity and temperature levels in the traditional breeding waters of right whales, Eubalaena glacialis, one of the rarest baleens left in the world, nearly hunted to extinction. The research had been physical—careening around in boats, scuba diving—and the most fulfilling work of his life.
Then, in early 2016, his mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer (proving the veracity if not the efficacy of those warning labels on cigarette packages), and Rowan took a leave from NOAA to return home to Boston to help her through chemo and radiation.
The events that followed were unrelated, except in the desktop of his mind, where they shared a file called COLLAPSE 2016–2018:
She had raised him alone, this brash, larger-than-life woman who used to list on forms that asked for his father’s name: “Business, None Yr.” His father had left nothing behind but a box of old albums—1970s country, mostly. Everything else Rowan got came from his mother (including her dreamy blue eyes, her love of booze and her difficulty with relationships). She was what used to be called “a character,” meaning she showed up hammered for school events, hit on his teachers, and once blew his college tuition money on a trip to Mexico. She made up adorable nicknames for his girlfriends, “Trampy-pants” and “IUDear,” and always made sure to call the newest girlfriend by the last girlfriend’s name. Even after Rowan escaped to college and grad school, to his own life, she exerted more influence on him than he would have wanted, and more than he wanted to admit.
But then she got sick, and before Rowan could get his mind around it, his mother was dead. This devastated him in a way he couldn’t explain. He felt bereft, his entire being altered, a moon without its planet.
His ensuing job search did little to alleviate the darkness. The government in 2017 was backing out of its fact-based obligations and there seemed to be thousands of academics and environmental researchers like him out looking for work. Rowan taught adjunct classes at a community college. He sat around listening to his dad’s records, preparing his mother’s house for sale—only to find out she’d borrowed heavily against it and owed more than it was worth. He drank, gained fifteen pounds, quit shaving. As his fortieth birthday approached, he toyed with adding a line to his CV: second PhD in abject failure, dissertation pending.
Even when things seemed to be going well—like this interview at Mississippi State—self-sabotage was never far off, as when the associate dean asked about his research, and Rowan explained that, before he lost funding, he was the project hydrologist on a team that studied how changing weather patterns had decimated two northeastern right whale pods. It was quiet in the dean’s office, and not long after that, they had their disastrous exchange about him being a “climate zealot.”
Rowan tried several times to correct course: “But even if I hadn’t lost my funding, I would’ve wanted to return to teaching. It’s my life’s work—inspiring young people. I consider myself a natural teacher.”
He sometimes imagined his mother in various situations, not like a ghost, exactly, but more like a sports commentator, and he pictured her just then, standing next to the associate dean, in one of her scandalously short dresses, holding a highball and cigarette. He could almost hear her smoky laugh—A natural teacher? Rowie, are you high?
“And I’ve always wanted to work in the South,” Rowan said. And, surprised to hear his voice crack, he added, “My father was from down here.” At that show of vulnerability, the associate dean simply stood. So, Rowan stood, too. And they shook hands. “Well, thanks for coming down,” the dean said. “I hope you have a nice flight home.”
It was the fifth university job he’d interviewed for; he’d whiffed on all five.
Even his nice flight home wasn’t meant to be.
That afternoon, monsoon winds and rain blew in. “All the flights in and out of Jackson are canceled,” explained Jeremiah, the sweet, nerdy kid who manned the desk at the Butler Guest House, the on-campus motel bricked up against the concrete walls of the stadium.
And so Rowan stayed another night in Starkville. This time there was no faculty dinner, no meteorology babes with clingy novelist boyfriends. He scavenged for food: some popcorn Jeremiah got him and a vending machine granola bar. He walked through the rain to the saddest liquor store since the last sad liquor store, where he grabbed a fifth of Jim Beam and a souvenir MSU flask. He took his booze and his flask back to the Butler Guest House.
In the morning, the storm had worsened, and the entire Jackson airport was closed. No getting out of Memphis either. The airline help desk had a three-hour wait. Outside, the rain turned to sleet. Rowan filled his flask and wandered around campus, getting pelted and speaking in the drawl he’d been practicing. “How y’all doin’ today?”
By the time the sleet became snow, Rowan was a little bit drunk, catching snowflakes on his tongue. He stepped into the campus Starbucks to get warm, and that’s when he saw her, this tall, intelligent-looking woman in glasses and a winter parka getting coffee.
He decided to try his accent on her—“Guessin’ y’all ain’t from Starkville—”
Only to find out she was here interviewing for the same job.
They bantered, shared a moment, a look, a pessimism, a flirtation, a certain time and place—
Time to come clean, he thought.
“Yeah, we-e-e-ell,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that guy.”
And now, in a certain time and place, these two job candidates, greased by Jim Beam, are laughing at the coincidence. She has a great smile, this Anna—making the components of her face (angular cheeks, unruly eyebrows, hastily arranged ponytail) come together into what one might call beauty. He even likes that her teeth aren’t too white—this is someone who might enjoy a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, someone who might even be a fan of his off-brand male imperfection.
“So . . . you are the guy who interviewed for my job,” she says.
“Technically, I was here first. You interviewed for my job.” In fact, he’d had a good feeling about Mississippi State. Before he flew down, he’d sat around his mother’s house, listening to that stack of crackling skipping country music. Those sad, twangy records: Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, and especially Johnny Cash—the more he listened, the more Rowan began to feel the music in his bones. He could live here. Life is hard, the songs seemed to say, but at least it’s funny, and it rhymes.
With Anna now, he resorts to his fake drawl once again. “Well, Miss Molson, I don’t suppose y’all would wanna get another bottle of whiskey and follow me on back to the Butler Guest House, maybe get drunk and have us a sloppy ol’ make-out session before your faculty dinner?”
She laughs. “I really should tell you something, Mr. Eastman. In case you do get this job and end up living in Mississippi. Y’all is used only for plural second person. For a group. So, if you were propositioning a group of people, you would say, ‘Do y’all wanna go get drunk and make out.’ But to inappropriately proposition just one person you would say, ‘Do you wanna go get drunk and make out?’
“And yeah, sure. Why not?”
4
JEREMIAH ELLIS OFFERS REFUGE TO DESPERATE SURVIVORS
In the Butler Guest House, at the Desk of Endless Suffering, Jeremiah sits behind a computer screen ignoring his half-written Special Topics in Poly-Sci paper. Instead, he edits a selfie on his iPhone, messing around with different filters. The storm has canceled everything and only two job candidates are staying in the Butler Guest House, so the reception desk is strangely quiet for a Friday night. This means Jeremiah has found himself with plenty of time to work on the important stuff—a new social media strategy.
He attempts a knowing-starlet pose—photographed from above, glasses off, cheeks sucked in, eyes gamine-like, open wide. He captions the picture, work study = work slutty, and tries different filters. He wishes personalities were like this: that you could just slide into a vivid warm version. A dramatic cool Jeremiah.
Finished, Jeremiah considers the photo. He’s not sure. His Come on face looks more like, Come on. Seriously? It is a look his roommate Garren calls: Jere myass.
He texts the photo to Garren, and to his sister in Benton—What do you think? They’ve both urged him to make his social media presence “more out.” (Or as Garren once put it, “Go gay or go home.”)
But Jeremiah has always been more careful, an analytical kid, a process-and-rule follower, which is probably why it took him all of high school and nearly three years of college to admit, even to himself, that he liked men. Raised Baptist in a small Louisiana town, he grew up assuming he’d be married before having sex of any kind. And while the religion mostly fell away, he isn’t quite ready to go full bathhouse.
In the one earbud he is allowed to wear at work, Rihanna preaches burning something, love on the brain, the kind of boldness that Garren urges—Jeremiah singing along in the empty reception area: “What you want from me—”
Garren has been Jeremiah’s best friend since winter quarter of their freshman year when they met in an honors history seminar and played together on an intermural basketball team called Five Guys with One Ball. They moved in together the next year. Garren was the first person that Jeremiah came out to—exactly three weeks ago. They were playing Super Smash Bros. in their apartment, and Jeremiah blurted out: “So I think I might be gay.”
Garren looked up from his controller. Four seconds passed. “Might be?” he finally asked. Garren is a short, smart white kid from Hattiesburg with glasses and terrible hair. Jeremiah is a short, smart black kid from Shelton, Louisiana, with glasses and terrible hair.
“Am gay?” Jeremiah said.
“How long have you known?”
Jeremiah didn’t know how to answer that. How does a person know what he knows, let alone when he knows it? He felt like a detective on a cold case, sifting through memories, hunches and suspicions (suspect owned two pairs of red shoes and likes Glee) but he finds nothing conclusive. Sure, he’d wondered, felt urges, crushes, but his feelings were fluid, changing day to day. And not knowing how other people felt, he didn’t know what was normal. Heck, doesn’t everyone get a dizzying crush on their male chemistry teacher?
Then, last month, the campus film club showed the movie Milk in conjunction with Spectrum, the gay and lesbian group on campus. Jeremiah loved the film—and was especially moved when Sean Penn delivered Harvey Milk’s iconic speech about hope (“You cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”). He’d never thought of being gay as a political act. But, as the credits ran, he felt emboldened, and he approached one of the Spectrum leaders, a charismatic senior named Trevor Blankenship.
“I feel like I’m coming to terms with some stuff,” Jeremiah said.
Trevor gave him a knowing look. “Well, you have support here.”
Trevor hugged him, and when they pulled back, their faces remained close. Jeremiah shocked them both by quickly kissing Trevor. “It was like a bomb going off,” Jeremiah told Garren. The kiss lasted only a second before he felt a hand on his chest, Trevor gently pushing him back, Jeremiah apologizing and hurrying off, Trevor calling after him, “It’s fine!”
Garren had listened quietly to this story. “That’s it?” he said finally.
“Well, yeah, so far,” Jeremiah said. “I’ve only been out—” He checked his watch. “Forty minutes.”
Garren’s brow furrowed, and he looked back at the TV. For a moment, Jeremiah worried if his revelation would ruin their friendship. But then Garren said the same thing he’d been saying to Jeremiah for two years. “Dude, we gotta get you laid.”
Of course, Garren was also a virgin. “We gotta get you laid,” Jeremiah said.
“Well, obviously,” Garren said. “But see, this helps me. I’m going to look so sensitive and progressive with a gay roommate.”
“Will you though?”
And like that, they were back to the same shit-talking Super Smash bros. In fact, Garren became Jeremiah’s strongest ally, talking him into going to the next Spectrum meeting. Jeremiah was surprised to find only fourteen other students there. Turned out there were only seventy-nine Spectrum members total—on a campus of twenty-two thousand students. But there had to be more gay kids than that at MSU, didn’t there? Were people just more closeted here, or was it a self-selecting thing: Did gay students intuit the conservative heart of Central Mississippi might not be the best place for them?
At the meeting, Jeremiah was encouraged to join the Pride Parade committee by a persistent woman who admitted she had an ulterior motive: she wanted broad racial representation on the parade committee. “And since you’re—” She stared at him. “Uh, Jeremiah, what exactly are you?”
Gay! would have been the correct Harvey Milk answer, or a RuPaulian Fabulous! But Jeremiah went with his old middle-school retort: “A mishmash, I guess.” Back in the Benton Middle School days, he’d list his rainbow grandparents in a single word: Blackfrenchalgeriannative. Maybe now he could trade that whole hyphenated bayou identity sampler for an emphatic Gay!
When Jeremiah got home, he told Garren he was on the parade committee. His helpful roommate volunteered to help him make a penis float. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s that kind of parade,” Jeremiah said, though, as always, he appreciated Garren’s enthusiasm.
And now, as if on cue, Garren texts back about the Jeremyass selfie:
You look hot as hell, Garren writes. Then: Gonna be rainin’ dick soon.
Not really dressed for dick-rain, Jeremiah writes back.
How’s work? Garren texts.
Oh man, crazy times at the Butt-Plug House
Four days a week, Jeremiah works here on the Desk of Unceasing Misery at the Butler Guest House, the on-campus motel for visiting parents, interviewing professors, and guest speakers.
Today, he braved the storm to find the BGH empty except for two job candidates. In Room 2: Miss Anna Molson (tall, nerd-pretty, like a woman who gets a movie makeover and rips off her glasses to reveal she’s been stunning the whole time) and in Room 4: Rowan Eastman (dad bod and the kind of unruly beard that white guys can get away with but would make Jeremiah look like a terrorist hobo).
But this is where it gets crazy: Dr. Dad Bod and Dr. Makeover are interviewing for the same job! And they apparently bumped into each other at the Starbucks! Nothing in the otherwise extensive Butler Guest House Manual about what to do in that situation.
And now they’re hanging out in his room, a fact Jeremiah discovered when he went to clean the coffeepot in the common area outside their rooms and he saw Dr. BeardyMan putting out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and Dr. LadyLady sitting on his bed.
He texts Garren: Never guess what the bearded prof is doing
What
The OTHER PROF
Fa reals
Dude put out the Do Not Disturb
They interview for the same job and then bone-in pork chop?
Right?!?!
Kinda hot tho
Yeah, cept er’body having sex but Jeremyass
Garren-teed ain’t havin sex neither, yo
Jeremiah is texting back (Not exactly a news flash) when he looks up to see two other professors duck out of the storm and into the waiting area in front of the Butler Guest House. The man is shaking water off a closed umbrella.
Jeremiah recognizes him: Henderson Anders, the novelist and English prof who taught a Contemporary Fiction of the South class that Jeremiah and Garren took together as sophomores. The class turned out to be wildly entertaining, in no small part because it took very little prompting to distract Dr. Anders from his lectures and send him on a profanity-laced tirade about other, more successful southern authors who wrote “cloying, derivative bullshit.”
With Dr. Anders is the pretty young weather teacher always on the campus TV station. She brushes the sleet from her coat. Shelves of shimmery brown hair descend either side of a perfect middle part and frame eyes that seem lit from within. She is carrying a picnic basket. “Whew!” she says. “I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.”
“Oh, hey, Jeremiah,” Dr. Anders says. “This is my girlfriend, Dr. Nancy Poole.” Dr. Anders has a bottle of red wine in one hand. His other hand is square in Dr. Poole’s back.
“We were supposed to take a job candidate to dinner,” Dr. Poole explains. “Anna Molson?”
“Oh yeah, she’s back there,” Jeremiah says.
“I’ve been trying to call her phone, but I think it’s turned off. With this storm, everything is closed. So, we thought we’d just bring some food and a bottle of wine and find a place here to talk.”
Jeremiah wonders if he should tell them why Anna Molson is not answering her phone. He imagines pulling out the thick Butler Guest House Manual and looking in the index for the unlikely heading “Sex, Guests Having (p. 13).”
But Dr. Anders changes the subject. “Hey, I saw your name on the Pride Parade flyer.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Jeremiah laughs nervously and feels his face heat up.
“It’s unconscionable,” Dr. Anders says, “those fundamentalists at the city rejecting your parade permit.”
For a moment, Jeremiah had fantasized the parade as his own personal coming-out ceremony. In his imagination it would be like one of Harvey Milk’s rallies. He’d step outside his apartment, and a crowd would be there (mostly men with moppy ’70s hair and tight jeans), and he’d go all Sean Penn on them: “You’ve got to give them hope!”
At the Desk of Infinite Awkwardness, Dr. Poole shakes her head. “I hope you know how much support you have within the faculty.”
“Thanks,” Jeremiah says. He tells them that the parade committee is meeting tomorrow to vote on their options: (1) postpone the parade while they appeal, (2) have the parade only on campus, or (3) defy the town council and march downtown without a permit.
“You have to march,” says Dr. Anders. “Make the bastards arrest you.”
“Yes!” Dr. Poole says. “March straight downtown and put it right in their old, bigoted faces.”
Jeremiah smiles at these well-meaning white liberals telling a shy brown kid to go antagonize a bunch of small-town southern police officers. He thinks about his grandfather, who rode with the Freedom Riders in the 1960s and who used to say things like, “Whatever you’ve got to live for, you have to be willing to die for, too.”
Is Jeremiah willing to die for a pride parade? He wouldn’t mind actually having a year or two of being gay before getting beaten up for it. Or arrested. It’s easy for these professors to push his civil disobedience, but he’s the one who would have to go out into the job market next year with a conviction on his record. How does that tend to turn out?
And what would his old scripture-quoting grandfather, with his stories of facing down dogs and fire hoses and sheriffs, say, if he discovered Jeremiah’s “to die for” cause was a gay parade? Would he sit up in his grave and yell “Abomination!”?
When the parade permit was rejected, Jeremiah had felt both relieved and demoralized. He joked with Garren that maybe he should’ve stayed fake-straight. Statistically, he’s done better that way, having kissed three girls in his life and only one guy, the aforementioned Trevor Blankenship, who, because he has a boyfriend now seems uncomfortable around Jeremiah. (Seventy-nine gay people on campus and he’s already alienated two?) At least as a fake-straight, he got some good high school dance pictures out of the deal.
Garren, who never lets his lack of knowledge of a particular subject dull his expertise, had the answer. “It’s the whole ‘coming out’ myth,” Garren said. “I think you have to do more than just announce you’re open for business. Think about it, if ten percent of people are gay, then you have to work ten times harder.”
There must be gay bars in Memphis and Birmingham, Garren suggested cheerfully, but besides not yet being twenty-one, Jeremiah isn’t ready for that; he’d feel like a freshman wandering into a graduate seminar.
Of course, there was another alternative, but every time Jeremiah looks at Grindr, it makes him feel oily, and he’s not quite ready for the weirdos and glory holers, the spankers and yankers, the secret married closeted football coaches, state troopers, and insurance agents.
That’s why, in his soft-focus imagination, the parade had sounded like the perfect way to come out—in the open, with sunlight and rainbows, signs and songs and speeches and . . . sigh, sweet Trevor Blankenship at his side.
Jeremiah looks up from these thoughts to find the professors hovering above the Desk of Endless Banality, like they expect something from him. He wonders if he should give his Harvey Milk speech now. (You’ve got to give them hope! And a parade permit!)
“You were going to call Dr. Molson’s room,” Dr. Poole reminds him. “Let her know we’re here with dinner.”
“Oh, right,” Jeremiah says. “Sorry!” He picks up the phone. But of course, Dr. Molson isn’t in her room. She is in Dr. Eastman’s room, no doubt staring at this very moment at his PhDick.
Yes, this situation is definitely not in the Butler Guest House Manual.
“Um, okay . . .” Jeremiah hangs the phone up. “You know what, I think I’ll just go back and knock. ’Cause, uh . . . the phones have been . . . and . . . the storm . . . I’ll be right back.”
A small courtyard separates the Desk of Perpetual Wretchedness from the guest rooms. Jeremiah runs across it—the snow a stinging sleet now—and enters the guesthouse. He walks through the common area to Room 4. The DO NOT DISTURB sign is still on the door. He listens outside the door: Laughter. Music.
He puts his ear closer, against the door.
Shit. Marvin Gaye?
Marvin Gaye + Do Not Disturb = middle-aged people having sex.
Although, as he listens, he recognizes the song as “Mercy Mercy Me,” which is less sexy than, say, “Let’s Get It On,” but it is still Marvin Gaye, the only singer who can make Fish full of mercury sound almost hot.
What to do? Jeremiah stands there a full minute until the song finishes. He listens for sex sounds, but all he hears is more laughter; then Dr. Molson says, “Okay, that one was easy, but you looked so cold.”
Then Dr. Eastman says: “I got one!” And before Jeremiah can knock, a new song starts—Lou Reed singing about the last great American whale.
Maybe they aren’t having sex yet. Maybe geoscience professors get off playing environmental songs first. Finally, Jeremiah knocks. But behind the door, they don’t seem to have heard over the music.
“I don’t know that one!” Dr. Molson says.
“Off with it then!” Dr. Eastman yells, while Lou Reed mutters about shitting in rivers and dumping battery acid in streams. Dead rats washing up on beaches.
Yeah. No way sex is going on in that room, Jeremiah thinks. He leans in to knock even harder.
And that’s when the door from the courtyard opens, and Dr. Anders and Dr. Poole step into the guest room atrium with their food and wine. Dr. Anders still has his free hand on Dr. Poole’s back, as if Dr. Poole is a puppet that Dr. Anders operates.
“Is everything okay, Jeremiah?” Dr. Poole asks. (Jeremiah looks at Dr. Anders to see if his mouth moved.)
“You were gone a long time,” Dr. Anders adds.
“Oh, yeah, sorry. She must have gone somewhere—”
Then another door opens—Room 4—and Jeremiah turns to see Dr. Eastman step into the hall wearing nothing but a pair of blue boxer briefs.
He is carrying an ice bucket and looking back over his shoulder as he pretends to run in super slow motion. “Must . . . get . . . ice . . . before . . . glacier . . . melts!”
Dr. Eastman slo-mo turns to see Jeremiah and the other two professors outside his door. He stops, straightens, and lowers the ice bucket to cover his crotch.
The door to the room is wide open, and inside, they can all see Dr. Molson, barefoot, wearing pants but no shirt or bra. Her back is to them, and she has a drink and is dancing—possibly worse than Jeremiah has ever seen a human being dance before—to a song by the Pretenders. She belts out the lyrics in a voice as unfortunate as her dance moves—
“I went back to Ohio—”
Finally, Dr. Topless turns to Dr. Boxer Briefs. “Oh and get more popcorn—”
For a moment everyone freezes—
Weather is climate in a certain time and place.
In this time and place, two mildly depressed scientists interviewing for the same job have been caught in some kind of deviant envirosexdeath party by an overlooked genius of southern literature (his grotesque, generationally damaged characters speaking to themes of a perverted American history) and a meteorology professor who teaches her students to stand in front of a green screen and cheerfully narrate the death of the planet.
In the middle, like the referee at a wrestling match, or the host at a swingers’ club, stands young Jeremiah Ellis, who thinks: My God, I really am the only person on the planet not having sex, aren’t I?
5
CIVILIZATION DEVOLVES INTO A DEBAUCHED HELLSCAPE
Even in disaster, there is the endless human capacity for adaptation. Consider: after a few seconds of awkwardness (Dr. Poole: “Oh my!” Dr. Eastman, looking for his pants: “We were just—” Dr. Anders: “We’ll come back—” Dr. Molson, hurrying into her bra: “No, just a sec—”), a surprising acceptance settles over the intrepid survivors.
Jeremiah returns from the Desk of What-the-Hell-Did-I-Just-See with four wineglasses and a corkscrew. Dr. Eastman and Dr. Molson are fully dressed and sitting with their guests in the guesthouse commons as if nothing has happened.
They share the snacks Dr. Poole brought, the wine Dr. Anders brought, and the last of Dr. Eastman’s whiskey. Soon, they are laughing—
DR. MOLSON: “So mortifying—”
DR. ANDERS: “Really, it’s nothing—”
DR. POOLE: “Job interviews are stressful—”
DR. EASTMAN: “These wontons are terrific—”
Anna explains how she and Rowan met and were drinking together to blow off job-interview steam, and how they eventually invented the game Strip Name That Tune, Environmental Edition, and that Rowan was losing badly, having failed to identify so many songs that Anna had to go easy on him with Marvin Gaye.
“Thank you for that,” Dr. Anders says.
Rowan and Anna talk about the motivation behind their wild afternoon—the storm and the grim associate dean who made them both feel like they had no chance for the job (“Yes, he can be abrupt,” Dr. Poole confirms).
And then they share their sense of screw-it-all frustration about the blithe reaction of their fellow Americans in the face of overwhelming evidence (some of which they have personally gathered) of environmental doom.
“Honestly, after a while, you feel like saying ‘I give up. It’s not worth it,’” Dr. Molson says. “So to have Rowan say, ‘Screw it, let’s get drunk’ . . . well . . .” She laughs and doesn’t finish the thought.
“I get that,” Dr. Poole says. “You bang your head against a wall, yelling, ‘We have to do something,’ and half the country still votes for corrupt, science-denying assholes.”
“It’s like we’re eager for the end now,” Dr. Anders adds. “Like, as a nation, we’ve decided to just go ahead and blow our kids’ inheritance.”
“Yes!” Dr. Eastman picks up on this metaphor: “Like a mother who borrows against her worthless house to sneak booze and cigarettes while she’s getting cancer treatments, and then dies leaving a house worth half what she owes on it.”
The others note the personal turn of the metaphor.
“Meanwhile,” Dr. Molson says, “we put pressure on women to have kids, to freeze their eggs. Why? Seven billion people on the planet, each new baby a tiny climate disaster unto himself.” She tells them about a Swedish study that found that each American child brought into the world means another fifty-eight metric tons of carbon dioxide. To offset the carbon footprint of one more American baby, 684 teenagers would have to become impeccable recyclers who gave up air travel for the rest of their lives.
“He’s got kids,” Dr. Poole says, with a slight hint of accusation, pointing to Henderson Anders.
“They hate me,” the novelist says.
“Well, at least that’s something,” Rowan says.
Jeremiah finishes setting the table with napkins, water glasses, and a pitcher of water. He tells them he’ll be at the desk. He looks around the room and feels like he’s glimpsed some secret adult truth, the ain’t-no-Santa-Claus cynicism with which these scientists view the world.
They are effusive in thanking Jeremiah. He says he will check back to see if they need anything. Three more hours on this shift.
Jeremiah returns to the Desk of Complete Confusion to work on his Poly-Sci paper, but he can’t concentrate. Every twenty minutes he crosses the courtyard to check on the guests—and in this way, he picks up shards of conversation, like a time-lapse lecture on the horrors of climate science. He learns, among other things:
Each topic is more disturbing than the last for Jeremiah, the final blows coming when he delivers a fresh bottle of wine that he has liberated from a cabinet in the Alumni Events office.
But this nihilistic lecture on impending environmental doom—by turns edifying and terrifying—is only half of what Jeremiah witnesses that night in the common area outside the guest rooms across the courtyard in the Butler Guest House at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi, United States, North America, Earth. In addition:
On a normal night, Jeremiah would call campus security, as he often has with fraternity alumni guests. But with the storm, the empty guesthouse, and the grim prospects for humanity, Jeremiah thinks, Aw hell, let them have their end-of-the-world fun.
And so, they have their end-of-the-world fun. In addition to the rest of Dr. Eastman’s whiskey and the three bottles of wine, Dr. Anders remembers he has some edibles in his car, and he ventures out in the rain, and they suck on some weed-laced Jolly Ranchers, which quiets the party a bit.
Then a laptop is procured and the music returns, at first with the same environmental theme as earlier (sans stripping), but after “Big Yellow Taxi,” they decide massive planetary collapse calls for dance music, and the volume creeps higher until it crosses the courtyard, and Jeremiah finds himself tapping his foot to a Donna Summer song at the Desk of No Fun Whatsoever.
Dance music invariably leads to dancing, and in the last hour of Jeremiah’s shift, he sees every combination of dance floor coupling across the courtyard, boy-girl, girl-girl, even, at one point, boy-boy, although, afterward, when the two men refuse to kiss, Drs. Poole and Molson boo so heartily that Dr. Anders grabs Dr. Eastman and they re-create the famous D-Day sailor photo.
By this time, the adults are trashed. Jeremiah sits out at the Desk of Ungodly Patience doing homework for an hour after his shift ends before finally asking them to wind down the party. He doesn’t want to lose his job. He’s gotten in trouble only once at the BGH, and that was when a group of visiting football recruits got hold of some beer and broke a few windows after he went home, his supervisor Lame Jimmy explaining that his shift doesn’t end until “lights-out” and all is quiet.
But this party is far from lights-out. Dr. Eastman has explained that he inherited a healthy stack of 1960s and ’70s country music from his father, and he calls up an old Johnny Cash album, At San Quentin, to play a song about the night Johnny got arrested by the police, right here in Starkville. “I never knew my father,” he admits. “So, when I was a kid, I used to picture Johnny Cash.”
They toast Rowan’s dad and begin singing “Folsom Prison Blues” at full volume, loudly confessing to shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Is a song admissible in court, Jeremiah texts Garren.
Rappers hope not, Garren texts back.
The profs see him lurking on the edge of the party with his phone. “Jeremiah! Come sing with us!”
“Come dance, Jeremiah!”
No, he has a big day tomorrow.
The professors offer him wine, and when he says no, a pot Jolly Rancher. Jeremiah confesses that he doesn’t drink or use drugs.
“Wonderful!” they say, and “That’s great!” and “Good for you!” For a good five minutes, four trashed adults go on about how swell it is that Jeremiah doesn’t get trashed.
In fact, Jeremiah asks, “Is there any way you could bring the party down a notch?” He explains that he isn’t supposed to leave until “all is quiet,” and he has this Spectrum meeting tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. and if he could just—
“Right! Spectrum! The parade!” Dr. Anders grabs Jeremiah by the shoulder and yells at a volume completely unnecessary for both topic and proximity: “You gotta convince them to march straight downtown!”
Dr. Anders then proceeds to tell Drs. Molson and Eastman about the MSU Pride Parade and how Jeremiah is on the committee that applied for a parade permit and how the old Christians on the Starkville town council denied them—the only parade permit denial in town history. And how Jeremiah will be voting tomorrow about whether to postpone the parade, contain it to campus, or march right through downtown and challenge the Starkville police to do something about it.
Among the drunken, depressed professor cohort, the vote is unanimous: “You gotta march downtown!” And “Make them throw you in jail.”
Their sloppy encouragement reminds Jeremiah of the time his dad and his uncle Mo got hammered at his Grandma Jean’s wake and then took turns giving him terrible life advice. (Biggest thing is, never let go of a grudge!)
Inexplicably, Dr. Eastman has adopted what he appears to think is a Mississippi drawl, and he tells Jeremiah, “Y’all gotta fight, my man.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to remember that,” Jeremiah says.
Dr. Anders has a spittle string between his lips like Uncle Mo sometimes gets. “Don’t let the assholes get you down, J-dog.”
Dr. Poole cries, “Be strong, Jeremiah.”
Dr. Molson says, “You know, I’m a little bit bisexual myself.”
“Okay then,” Jeremiah says, and he exits. All is definitely not quiet, but there is no precedent for this night. Since two faculty members are here, he hopes he won’t get in trouble for leaving.
Back at the Desk of What the Hell Does It Matter Anyway, Jeremiah fills out his last log report. He shuts down his computer and sits quietly for a moment, thinking about this strange night. He feels sick, like a kid who has heard more than he was supposed to hear. It’s not like he’s been unaware of the dangers of climate change. It’s the level of their pessimism, the surety of it, that stings.
Environmental doom has always been aimed at personal behavior: recycle, don’t eat beef, drive a hybrid. But this. This is different. This is not about fixing the problem; it’s about giving in to it. Their nihilism devastates him. It’s one thing to hear adults say there’s no Santa. But to hear there’s no Future? Swift kick to the soul.
Jeremiah unplugs his phone from where it’s been charging. Four times a day, he must recharge this little device, this cord connecting him to the rest of the world. What does it take to make this marvel of innovation and science? At what cost? And, if these scientists are right, what will happen when these things shut down—when it all shuts down?
His sister has finally written him back, saying that his earlier profile pic was Hot, hilarious, perfect!
There are also three new messages from Garren: You coming home? Get picked up by a serial killer? Be careful out there.
Deena and Garren. These people who love him . . . and his love for them . . . it’s overwhelming . . . what did Dr. Molson say, seven billion people on the planet . . . each new baby a tiny disaster . . . and yet we love our people so much . . . what becomes of them?
In church, they always insisted that the meek will inherit the earth, but Jeremiah has been meek for a good twenty years and this clearly falls under the heading of false advertising.
It’s all so disheartening. Why bother voting or marching or . . . anything. He wants to yell at his small-town red-state high school science teachers for leaving out a few pertinent details—like the fact that the planet is fucked. The religious kooks are right: we really are living in end-times. It’s as if he’s only ever seen the pieces and, now, he sees the whole broken puzzle.
Hopeless, Jeremiah thinks.
Yep. That’s the word.
He puts his head in his hands.
When he can sit up again, Jeremiah texts Garren: On my way. He texts Deena: Love you, Sis. He writes a note to the morning supervisor, Lame Jimmy. Then he grabs his coat and stands to leave.
Jeremiah glances once more through the window across the courtyard. He can’t quite see what’s going on, just bodies moving, dancing, or maybe it’s devolved into something else, something he doesn’t want to know, like coming across some channel of twisted professor porn. Do not see that. It cannot be unseen.
Finally, he leaves the Desk of Blissful Ignorance.
Outside, the storm has subsided. The temperature has risen, and whatever snow fell earlier has melted. Tree branches and leaves are strewn everywhere. It is a cool but mostly clear Mississippi night. The moon even flashes from behind a cloud for a moment as Jeremiah walks alone. He cuts across campus, stepping over branches and debris—wet papers, an MSU banner, some construction tape—all blown around in the storm. He passes the stadium, the highway, the cemetery. A few cars go by, but otherwise, he doesn’t see a soul. Seven billion people on the planet, and tonight, he is the only one. He reaches the apartment he shares with Garren, in an old sharecropper house where families worked in the cotton fields until they died. One of Jeremiah’s great-great-grandfathers was a sharecropper, the son of slaves. There is a family story of an uncle who was lynched for nothing more than sleeping beneath a farmer’s apple tree.
Jeremiah thinks that word hopeless again.
He stands outside. Stares up at the endless sky.
6
JOHNNY CASH INEXPLICABLY APPEARS IN AN OTHERWISE DYSTOPIAN CLIMATE CHANGE STORY
Another spring night, another time and place, and Johnny Cash finishes playing at the country showcase at Mississippi State University. As so often happens with Johnny that year, the strung-out singer can’t sleep after performing; he’s too high, too horny, too raucously curious. The instruments are loaded, and the rest of the musicians, including his future wife, June Carter, go back to the University Motel to get some rest before moving on to the next town. Johnny sets out alone, a paperback book in his back pocket. He wanders from party to party, on campus and off, closing them all down until he finally gets a ride back to the motel.
He still can’t sleep, though, and at 2:00 a.m. he leaves his room and ambles away from the motel to get some cigarettes. He wanders down a residential street, lined with magnolias, and steps into a yard to pick “a dandelion here, a daisy there.” What happens next will make its way into a minor song in the Cash canon, “Starkville City Jail,” from the second of Johnny’s four live prison albums, At San Quentin.
A patrol car pulls up and shines a light into the yard where Johnny is either picking flowers or relieving himself, and he finds out the hard way that there is a curfew in Starkville. He is arrested for public drunkenness and vagrancy. And, as Johnny sings, you go to the Starkville City Jail.
He bonds out six hours later after paying a thirty-six-dollar fine.
Years later, a reporter named Robbie Ward will track down the man who claims to have been Johnny’s cellmate that night in 1965. Smokey Evans was fifteen and was in jail for public drunkenness when the singer was brought in. He didn’t sleep at all that night, according to Smokey. Johnny paced around, raging and yelling and kicking at the bars so hard he eventually broke a toe. The last thing he did before he left the cell was hand over to Smokey his battered black shoes. “Here’s a souvenir,” he reportedly said. “I’m Johnny Cash.”
That morning in 1965, Johnny walks down the center aisle of the tour bus, disheveled and exhausted. His fellow musicians barely notice. That’s just John. But June Carter sees that he’s limping a little, and when she looks down, she wonders why he is not wearing shoes.
Fifty-three years later, Jeremiah Ellis lies in bed in the same town wondering what it will be like for him to be arrested and taken to the Starkville City Jail. After all, he will not just be some kid breaking the law; he will be a gay, mixed-race kid breaking the law, the great-great-great-grandson of slaves, an uppity Negro to some old southern sheriff’s deputy with a secret nostalgia for anti-miscegenation laws or a target for some bigoted inmate.
Maybe he shouldn’t go to the meeting at all. Maybe he has no business being in a Pride Parade; you could argue that a person should have to be openly gay longer than three weeks to get to express pride over it. And what if those cynical professors are right—what if the world is headed for cataclysm? In the face of that, what does it matter if seventy-nine gay people (and that’s if everyone shows up) put on a stupid parade in a city where they’re not even wanted? Maybe he just should follow the professors’ lead and get drunk. Cut loose. It’s like he’s been saving his life up—for what? He should live a little while there’s still time. Maybe Garren is right (stupid and crass, but right), and he should spend more time worrying about getting laid. Let it rain dicks.
Is this the way the world ends?
Of course, it’s an impossible question, a paradox because it is both a complete certainty and utterly unknowable, as undeniable and incomprehensible as the beginning of the universe or the creation of life.
Yeah, that’s it, ain’t it? says Johnny Cash. Thirty-six dollars for picking flowers and a night in jail? You can’t hardly win, can ya?
But there are things that we can know:
On his last album, Ain’t No Grave, Johnny Cash will sing that no grave can hold his body down. Unfortunately, this will turn out to be wishful thinking, and he will die of complications from diabetes in 2003. In 2005, his old cellmate Smokey Evans will die, too, from injuries sustained in a fistfight. Smokey will leave his prized possession, Johnny Cash’s black shoes, to his nephew in Georgia, but the shoes will go missing not long after that.
Nancy Poole will find out she is pregnant, and she and Henderson Anders will get married in a little ceremony at city hall. They will have twins, a girl and a boy. The first few years of marriage will not be easy, though, and they will divorce four years after the twins are born. But Henderson will feel lost without his family and will agree to seek counseling for his lifelong depression and control issues. The couple will reconcile and eventually remarry in a lovely ceremony on campus, little Eudora Anders serving as the flower girl for her parents, little Faulkner Anders the ring bearer.
Rowan Eastman will end up getting the Mississippi State job when the department’s first choice turns it down. He will finally find a home in Starkville. The sushi is surprisingly good, and there’s a fine group of progressive-minded people. The students are smarter than he assumed, and his climate zealotry won’t be an issue. In fact, he will organize the first-ever Central Mississippi Climate Conference and will become faculty adviser for an environmental group on campus. He will remain friends with Nancy and Henderson Anders until they divorce, when Rowan screws it up by asking Nancy out. (When Henderson finds out, he punches his friend in the face, a sequence of events that will show up barely fictionalized in Henderson’s novel Starkville.) But Rowan will apologize, and, slowly, over time, he will begin to step out of the long disaster-filled shadow of his mother—until he meets a woman just like her, a country music fan and bartender named Carla, whom he promptly marries.
Anna Molson will decide not to have a baby, or to freeze her eggs. She will decide not to get her hair cut. She will not move to Mississippi—in fact, when the associate dean offers her the job, she will simply say, “I’ve decided to stay in my current position.” She will not tell Bashir about “that night,” and they will decide to continue their careers and their long-distance relationship. In what they call their recommitment ceremony, Bashir will remove the Tinder app from his phone. (Her: “Um, I think that was Uber Eats.” Him: “Oh, right, sorry.”) Eventually, when Anna moves on to a new project, Bashir will move to Siberia to be near her.
More importantly, Anna will go back to her research with a renewed sense of purpose. In two years, her paper on Siberian ground temperature variance, solubility, and melt-rate will catch the attention of an international team working on new techniques for carbon capture—the groundbreaking technology of taking carbon dioxide waste from energy plants and out of the air and pumping it straight down into volcanic rock, where it quickly forms a solid, either calcite or ankerite. While only tested in small, isolated instances, the technology has the potential to cleanly dispose of billions of tons of carbon dioxide—if it can be reproduced on a large scale. Among Anna’s contributions will be suggesting the Siberian Traps as a potential site, her research showing that the cold temperatures speed up and stabilize the solidification process so that even the more transportable but unpredictable liquid carbon dioxide can be stored and buried. The massive size of the traps, some seven million square kilometers, roughly the same as Australia, make this the first real candidate for large-scale carbon capture, and when Anna’s team is awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize, the New York Times sends a reporter to Siberia to interview her. She points out how the Siberian Traps were likely formed during the last major extinction, the Great Dying, some 250 million years ago, when 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species were destroyed, in part because of massive volcanic activity in Siberia.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic if this place that once destroyed life now helps save it?” she is quoted in the Times. “The challenges before us are mind-boggling, of course, but this is one small step, and it gives me hope.”
7
WITH A WHIMPER AND A BANG
As so often happens after a storm, the quality of air the morning after the great climate orgy is breathtaking. The clarity and richness, the way the air is imbued with moisture, and the colors—the sky a soft white-blue, like a thing forgiven. Trees and plants pop with every shade of green, and the buckeyes defiantly flower in what look like tiny red peppers. It’s as if the whole once-in-a-century storm were just a dream, a scary story told around a campfire.
Is it any wonder we are pulled so quickly from our sense of doom, from sorrow and desperation, in such a world as this? Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility? Jeremiah feels a stirring as he crosses campus and sees this beauty all around him.
Anna Molson is mostly feeling the fragility. Her mouth is so dry she wishes there were a drier word than dry to describe how dry her dry mouth is. She’s not sure where she is. She sits up and hits her head on a keyboard tray. She is apparently . . . under a desk. She’s not sure whose desk.
She looks down and sees with horror that she is wearing nothing but a man’s T-shirt and underwear. At least it’s her underwear. That’s good. The T-shirt is blue and has the words CUBA and PARADISE OF THE TROPICS on it.
“Everything okay, Dr. Molson?”
She looks up to see Jeremiah standing in the doorway of the Butler Guest House reception area.
“I think so.” Now she vaguely remembers leaving Rowan’s room after a drunken debate about where she should sleep. “I got locked out of my room. I came out here to see if you had a spare key in your desk. I must’ve fallen asleep.” She tries to remember what time that was. Four maybe? “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty,” Jeremiah says. After a mostly sleepless night, he has come by the Butler Guest House to clean up before Lame Jimmy starts his shift at seven, and he has found Dr. Molson sleeping under the Desk of Morning Regret.
He nods toward the courtyard and the common area by the guest rooms. “Is it . . . safe to go back there? I should clean up before my boss comes in.”
And suddenly, shame joins her headache and dry mouth, Anna wondering, how much did Jeremiah see—and how much was there to see? She’s never done anything quite like that before—even though she’s not entirely clear all that entailed, or with whom it entailed. She does remember Bashir texting at some point, How was the faculty dinner? She felt the buzz of her phone just as she and Dr. Poole were starting a slow, grinding striptease for the two cheering men. She remembers stopping the dance, reading Bashir’s text, and thinking of all the lies he must’ve told while he was sleeping with half of Miami. She texted back, Uneventful, tossed her phone aside, and went back to helping Nancy Poole out of her shirt.
“Why don’t you let me go back there first?” Anna tells Jeremiah. She is still half under Jeremiah’s desk, and she looks around for something to put on. Jeremiah says he knows where they keep extra graduation robes, so he grabs one for her and she puts it on.
“Thank you,” she says.
The common area is a mess of wine and whiskey bottles, potato chips, popcorn, and strewn clothes.
Anna pushes on Rowan’s slightly open door and sees the other three sleeping it off—Rowan alone in one queen-size bed, Henderson and Nancy curled up in the other. (In her own drunken logic, she remembers looking for a key in Jeremiah’s desk, thinking that if she slept in her own room, she could tell Bashir that she hadn’t “slept with anyone.”)
Jeremiah comes into the common area with a broom and cleaning supplies.
“I’m so sorry for this,” Anna says. “It really got out of hand.”
“It’s fine,” says Jeremiah as he picks up the pieces of a broken wineglass. “If we can just get this all cleaned up before my boss comes in.”
“We should’ve been more considerate,” Anna says again.
“It’s really fine,” Jeremiah said, “I’m glad you had fun.”
Fun. Jesus.
Jeremiah pauses with the broom. “But can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” she says.
“Is everything as awful as you made it sound last night?”
Anna tries to figure out how to explain last night—the collision of middle adulthood and the current, depressing state of politics, of the world, and her own late-thirties malaise, Bashir and the Molson-Reed Axiom to the Golden Rule, her eggs dying—all of it.
“I think it’s a stressful time, and I guess we felt the need to cut loose a little,” Anna says.
“I don’t mean what happened here,” Jeremiah says. “I mean what you were talking about. You all sounded so defeated. I went home last night, and I couldn’t stop thinking the word hopeless, over and over—that people are an infection and babies destroy the planet and how everything we do just makes it worse.”
Anna stares at this earnest boy, his thick glasses, crooked Afro, button shirt, baggy jeans. She feels the final weight of her full shame. “Jeremiah—” she begins.
But he wants to finish. “I’m not very old,” Jeremiah says. “I haven’t figured out who I am. And in two hours, I’m supposed to go vote on whether our stupid little gay club should march through town so a bunch of backward people can line up to call us fags and tell us we’re going to hell.
“But I guess it seems to me”—Jeremiah pauses, choosing his words carefully—“that you shouldn’t give up hope until you’ve done everything you can.”
This hits Anna like a fist, and she pictures students in other cities protesting the now-weekly school shootings, with their perfectly reasonable request to apply some basic common sense and rational thought, to do something, to enact some basic gun laws—and how demoralizing it must be to see those same adults shrug helplessly at the backward, illogical politics, to act as if it were all unavoidable.
“So, I guess that’s what I wanted to ask you,” Jeremiah says. “If you think we’ve done everything we can?”
It is this second question that takes Anna’s breath away. No, she thinks, we haven’t done a goddamned thing. Not really. We present at conferences, and we write papers and we make placards and we march on a specified day and then we go back to work, back to TV, back to lives of gossip and distraction. And to be asked this question by this kid, here, in Mississippi, where people died fighting for basic civil rights? It’s more than she can take. Anna begins to cry.
“I’m sorry—” Jeremiah starts.
She straightens, walks over to Jeremiah, and hugs him. She thanks Jeremiah and says: “There is so much more to do.”
Rowan Eastman hears a noise outside his room then and stirs awake. He sees Henderson and Nancy in the other bed and tries to put the night together in his mind—Wait, did I kiss Henderson? He wishes he hadn’t been so drunk and stoned so he could remember sequences instead of just random flashes. He decides to go find Anna and make sure she’s cool with everything that happened and maybe ask if he can see her again, although it puts a lot of pressure on a second date when the first one ends with a half-naked tangle of strangers.
He moans as he climbs out of bed and walks out of his room into the common area. There are four rules of thermodynamics that govern matter in the known universe, but after that day, Rowan will propose a fifth, Shit can always get weirder, when he comes out and sees, amid the empty wine bottles and strewn clothes, Anna, inexplicably wearing a black graduation gown, in a deep embrace with the work-study kid, Jeremiah. It is too much for Rowan, and he turns and goes back to bed.
And this is the way the world ends:
Jeremiah Ellis gives a rousing speech that morning at the Spectrum committee meeting, telling the gathered students, You don’t give up until you’ve done everything you can, and the parade committee votes unanimously to march right through campus and straight into Starkville, with or without a permit. Under pressure from all sides, the town council eventually grants a permit, and a month later, the streets of Starkville are filled with more than twenty-five hundred people marching for gay pride, carrying rainbow banners and balloons, waving MSU cowbells decorated with rainbow tape. Even more people cheer from the streets. They come from Birmingham, from Memphis and Jackson, and Jeremiah takes his place among them, marching in the front row with Trevor Blankenship and the other organizers. His roommate Garren marches a few rows back, wearing a STRAIGHT-BUT-SENSITIVE-AS-SHIT T-shirt of his own making. Jeremiah keeps looking over his shoulder, smiling, on the verge of tears as he takes in the faces, the rainbows, the sheer love—stretching block after block, through traffic lights, down streets, as far as he can see. There are protestors, of course, the last gasps of the superstitious and reactionary, those frightened of change, but their shrill voices are drowned out—for now—by the crowd’s chanting and singing, and by Jeremiah, who yells every few minutes, seemingly apropos of nothing: “You’ve got to give them hope!”