IMAGINE THAT THE DANGEROUS ROAD we now travel takes us right to the edge of the Late-K cliff. Nothing we do as individuals or as a country is working to reverse our path. United Nations treaties and conventions are of no help. A world we have long believed to be hospitable and predictable comes unhinged. Modern humanity tumbles into an abyss it has never experienced, worse by far than the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century, two world wars and the great depression of the twentieth century, or the recent recession of this century. C.S. Holling’s most profound fear — deep collapse — has happened. The global climate, the world’s oceans and biological diversity, its systems of nation states and international order, public health, finance and communications, energy, food supply, and transportation — all systems we take for granted and depend upon — concurrently break down. Collapse cascades across a myriad of boundaries. What we know as modern civilization crumples, as does its ability to recover, at least in human terms. We hit bottom with a resounding thud. Omega, both the final letter of the Greek alphabet and a symbol for the end of everything, is upon us.
How could this have happened? Broadly speaking, all the facets of Late-K lunacy described in the previous chapter have conspired to push the globalized system, with its seven-plus billion people, beyond critical thresholds. Tightly bound resources — the system’s wealth — disaggregate and are released, connections between subsystems decouple, regulatory controls dissipate, components are dispersed, and resilience disappears. The scene is chaotic. There remains no stable equilibrium and it may well be centuries or millennia for Earth as a system to regroup and begin to renew itself. If there is enough genetic material and if the climate, the oceans, and critical ecosystems (such as coral reefs, estuaries, inland watersheds, and rainforests) can begin to recover, the system ought to eventually sort out components that thrive from those that fall by the wayside. Evolution might then take its course and the thriving components can become building blocks for a progression toward α — alpha. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
If progress toward α does not occur, the impoverished planet could be caught in a trap from which it can never escape. Almost two generations ago, the late English astronomer Fred Hoyle foresaw such a trap:
We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned … No species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. Civilization is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.21
With humanity gone, imagine then a diminished Earth, its surfaces and oceans so degraded and biologically depleted that evolution has little to work with. Millennia onward, visitors from another solar system might be startled by a desiccated third planet from a still pulsing star, a planet that seemed to have been ideally positioned for life. But from a distance, it appears to be as dormant as its moon. “What kind of catastrophe could have caused this?” they might wonder as they survey the vast scale of desolation and observe indications that prosperous civilizations must have once thrived.
To answer their question, we must examine planetary-scale hazards that now loom. They are multiple — a rampant technology, our teeming and densely-packed numbers, our vulnerable biology, and our incessant compulsion to command and control. The hazards are also born of the perpetual stream of toxins we have released over the past two centuries to the lands, waters, and atmosphere. Toxins that, in Rachel Carson’s words, have been “acting upon us directly and indirectly, separately and collectively.” These toxins are especially frightening because exposure to them has neither been part of our own biological experience nor of that of our non-human relatives. But before we could have adapted and built immunity to these toxins, collapse would have sealed our destiny.
Without resorting to a maudlin catalogue of all the hazards twenty-first century humans face, let me single out four “drivers” that are matters of record and seem most likely to work synergistically in this cliffhanger. Of these drivers, none is more threatening than climate change. As science comes to understand climate dynamics, it seems more and more likely that climate itself, which has changed sometimes slowly, sometimes in sudden leaps over the millennia, could precipitously flip from one state to another. If that is so, it would mean that our climate could rapidly be approaching tipping points, ready to shift into a run-away mode that humans have never seen, with surely catastrophic consequences — rising sea levels, punishing storms, blistering summers, growing masses of environmental refugees, new and virulent human diseases.22 Need I say more?
Regional climate systems are linked interdependently like socio-ecological systems. One regional climate, say, arid and semi-arid zones, could conceivably cross a critical threshold and flip to a new regime. This would then topple other interdependent regional climates, mountain climates and Mediterranean climates for example, in a cascade effect much like the omega progression described above. Worse still, it might be impossible, particularly in a human timescale, to flip regional climates back to their original behavior. As Scientific American editor, Fred Guterl, recently wrote:
…[this] would create a whole new universe of possible ways the world might end. And it would mean that the most alarming of climate alarmists may turn out to be understating how bad things could get, and how quickly.23
If this be our fate, I foresee it as the worst of Late-K outcomes. A somewhat stable and predictable climate is, after all, fundamental to our future. Conversely, a wildly collapsing climate would haul many of our already vulnerable socio-ecological systems, which are helplessly tethered to their climates, right over the cliff. This is why I imagine that survivors in Brights Grove, in addition to many other obstacles, would be dealing with a new normal. They would be battling a challenging, unyielding climate. It would follow that many would fail to feed themselves and would succumb to starvation and disease.
A second set of drivers are species extinctions, biodiversity loss, and ecosystems diminishment. These combine to form a narrative that is scary enough in itself but even more foreboding for humanity’s future because this set of drivers could place our food supply at risk. What we know is that extinction rates of vertebrate species are now one-hundred times greater than they would be without us. In other words, species’ extinctions in our times are indisputably the outcome of intensifying human activities. Hunting, overfishing, habitat destruction, competition with invasive species, climate change, the altered chemistry of the oceans, monocultural agriculture, and many other human-generated causes endanger the future of at least three-fourths of all species. In just a few human generations from now, our great-great-great grandchildren will be living, if they are lucky enough to have adapted and survived, in a grim, diminished world. Elephants, polar bears, lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, blue whales, and many less charismatic species will no longer be part of those children’s experience or imagination. If indeed we are presently in the midst of a planetary extinction, it is an event that humans have never experienced, and, likely, “will only ever experience once.”24
Whether this progression will lead to our undoing is an open question. There is no doubt that with climates entering new domains, ecosystems diminishing and disappearing, and species dropping from existence, that critical other pieces of our support system will soon be threatened or eliminated. How would this impact our food system? Like all complex adaptive systems, the food system is subject to Late-K dynamics and dictates. Food crops, in fact, may be more vulnerable than other systems.25 Why? Investigation reveals that the project of feeding more than seven billion people has led to extreme Late-K over-connectedness and loss of redundancy, in this case expressed as over-dependence on just a handful of staple crops such as wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, sorghum and potatoes. These staples are propped up by elaborately entangled sets of systems that so far have ensured an adequate food supply overall, if not equal distribution and access. With climates changing rapidly, new patterns of precipitation and soil moisture and altered pest ecologies will inevitably affect these staples. Add to this the extinction of species of insects, pollinators, birds, and perhaps even organisms in the soil microbiome and one can understand how ecological disruption would impact our food supply.
Stocks of critical grains are already at ten-year lows. The amount of grain in storage now amounts to just twenty percent of the world’s needs in a year — a mere 71-day supply.26 Couple this shortfall with classic Late-K conditions in markets, transportation, trade regimes, fertilizer supplies and distribution (especially phosphates), seed production and distribution, irrigation systems — the list seems endless and daunting — and again you can fathom how our civilization, so dependent on ample amounts of cheap food, could falter. If you think panarchically, the combination of these elements could nudge our food system toward a situation in which a small, relatively contained set of shocks would be enough to seriously threaten our entire civilization.
What might those shocks be? In a scenario concocted in collaboration with my Brazilian colleagues, Thomas Verra and Elyana Sanchez, we combined windborne corn and wheat pathogens, a waterborne rice fungus, an abnormally hot and dry growing season causing a reduction in the amount of irrigation water, a shortfall in internationally supplied phosphates, work stoppages by farm workers, food riots in several states, and a transporters’ strike. We asked how this set of conditions would impact Brazil’s food supply.27 The answer: this combination of misfortunes led to shortfalls of more than thirty percent in six crops crucial to Brazil’s food security — maize, soybeans, wheat, peanuts, sugar cane, and rice. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks such as work stoppages and political instability, exacerbated by climate change and ecosystem diminishment, consequent water shortages, and counterproductive trends caused by the globalization of a key agricultural input (phosphates) led to significant food insecurity. Though this scenario involved just one country, because of the globalization of markets, it would ripple outward to other countries dependent on Brazil’s agricultural system. Conceivably, a perfect storm of conditions on a wider scale could undermine food supplies and food security enough to open the way toward wide scale hunger and starvation.
The third cluster of planetary drivers that loom year by year and surely interact with both climate change and the shredding of biological diversity is the emergence of pathogens capable of spreading rapidly across the human population. Humanity has, of course, survived an array of plagues, influenza outbreaks, and hemorrhagic diseases, none of which approached the obliteration of everybody. However, our era is different. Late-K conditions — declining novelty, over-connectivity, decreasing redundancy, and slow moving command and control systems — together with a warming planet and increasing densities of human populations, all within about 48 hours of each other by air, and a host of other factors have created spawning grounds for the emergence of superviruses ( e.g. SARS, Ebola and HIV) that with just a mite of genetic alteration can leap across species boundaries from animals to humans and then become virulent pathogens potentially leading to a global pandemic.
The H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak in 2009 could have become such a pandemic. By the time public health officials acknowledged the virus, it was rapidly dispersing across the world. Fortunately, it turned out to be mildly pathogenic. The media then began to attack the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization for their overreaction. In fact, it had not been an overreaction. H1N1 caught the worlds of virology and public health ill-prepared. Had the pathogen been as virulent as the 1918 influenza, it could have brought the world to a halt. It would have led to a doomsday scenario with mass fatalities and suffering beyond the imagination. Fred Guterl expressed it this way:
It’s hard even to imagine the effect mortality on the order of a severe pandemic would have on our modern world. You would have to go back to the Black Death that swept through Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century to come up with an analog … The writer John Kelly estimates that pestilence on the scale of the Black Death of the fourteenth century would claim almost two billion lives.28
A final driver at the global scale is the coming swan song of our carbon-fueled economy. The post-carbon era has been foretold for decades. Yet each time the demise of the era seems upon us, a breakthrough arrives in technology and investment, mainly through extracting oil and natural gas in remote or previously inaccessible parts of the planet. And so the fossil fuel fantasy gains new life. Currently, the booming gas and oil markets of North America based on hydrologic fracturing, mining Canadian oil sands, off-shore drilling around the world, and the prospect of exploiting oil and gas under the newly exposed Arctic Sea all promise to condemn the world to fossil fuels until the very last BTU has been burned and the last dollar earned. There are good explanations for this, among them the century-long infrastructural investment in oil and gas, the immense profits of the industry (enabling, of course, many good jobs), the political clout of the oil and gas industry, and the incontestable fact that no single source of renewable energy now available can pack so much raw power into such a compact package.
On the other hand, this recent oil and gas surge drives our planet in exactly the wrong direction. If we were intent on stabilizing and then reducing our output of carbon emissions, as well we should be, then we ought, as President Barack Obama has urged, to be leaving these new sources in the ground. Sadly, for the planet, the fracking boom in the US and elsewhere, Alberta oil sands, and Arctic oil will inevitably speed up climate change and all its devastating impacts, sooner rather than later. Perhaps, the point of no return will not arrive in the distant times of our great-great-great grandchildren, as I earlier wrote, but rather during the lives of our children and grandchildren. Ultimately a collapsing climate will contribute to the demise of a multitude of other complex systems and will bring on the sunset of the era of the greatest material abundance and heedless consumption in human history that itself was made possible by these sources of cheap energy. We come ‘round again to the dark prospect of climate change. James Hanson, the eminent American climatologist, concluded his stunning book, Storms of My Grandchildren, this way:
… a devastated, sweltering Earth purged of life … may read like science fiction. Yet its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty — continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of control.29
These planetary drivers, which underpin our existence in ways we take for granted, could cripple us. Does that mean that omega will cause every last human to perish? C.S. Holling offers a slim possibility that our collective realization of our plight, of our current degree of vulnerability, might “trigger a pulse of dramatic social transformation” on the order of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But the trigger is a hair-trigger. Things could go either way: thrusting humanity into frighteningly deep collapse or, admittedly a long shot, changing its course toward a creative rebuild.30
Are the so-called sustainable communities like Brights Grove the last and best hope? Long ago, I remember my outrage when I read these words, written by a scholar who detested the term “community sustainability”. I could not have disagreed more vigorously with her assessment. But now, knowing what I know about panarchy and having struggled with the plight of communities like Brights Grove, I find myself embracing her words.
Long before the interlinked events that led to abrupt and almost total collapse, people in power failed to heed the warnings, deluded as they were in achieving efficiencies, economies of scale, bigger machines and outputs, smaller costs per unit, and historic amounts of wealth funneling to the already wealthy. Despite these trends, ordinary citizens in a few places were hopeful. They believed their locally-scaled economies were resilient enough to weather the looming storms. They believed that they had achieved community sustainability. They were wrong.31
And yet, we are a devious and tenacious species. Even though our communities would surely be gutted, stragglers of our species may be able to survive the shocks and anarchy, the influenzas, the gone world of their ancestors. In the bleak and depleted decades after omega they may join together and begin to fashion a life without information systems, computers, mobile devices and wireless communications; without fossil-fuel infused transport and food production; without the vast material resources of government and foundations; even without robust ecological services. Their road from omega to alpha, if there is one, will be miserable and treacherous, a journey aiming toward some kind of tenuous future with but a sliver of hope to carry them through.
9
THOROUGHLY SCHOOLED ON PANARCHY by now, we students had become hyper-aware and prone to gallows humor about the Late-K circumstances of our day. After we read Nickleby's omega chapter, Stefan forced us to imagine the prospects of a bleak and depleted world and to ponder what we were supposed to do with this information.
Samantha and I had gone to ground, literally. We sat on the grass outside our tent. It was a balmy evening for October 29th, but I was bundled in jeans, wool socks, an orange Gilligan sweatshirt, and a matching skier’s toque topped with an orange tassel. Samantha, who had spent her life enduring North Dakota winters, wore shorts, flip flops, and a loose-fitting Gilligan t-shirt that did not quite conceal her capacious breasts. Samantha idly fussed with her hair which, in three-plus days, had not been shampooed. I studied her greasy strands, her stained t-shirt, her scuffed knees and dirty feet. I’d never seen my friend so disheveled yet so animatedly happy. I could never have imagined that Samantha, once the sorority’s most discriminating fashionista, would have persisted here for more than a few hours.
“Longing for a hot shower?” I asked.
Samantha smiled. “No way. Showering would be totally wussing-out.”
What was up with Samantha? Had she crossed over to the dark side? Last night, Samantha, a rabid teetotaler, sipped half of Nick’s beer and vowed never to cease fighting for Blackwood. In response to Nick’s question, she slurred, “Yeah, I would go'f ta jail to shave Blackwood.” I noted Nick surveying Samantha anew as if he’d like nothing more than to inspect the goods beneath her t-shirt. Samantha, tipsy for the first time in her life, might have obliged. Occupying the Quad must have provided Samantha license to live less virtuously and more dangerously, to strip away her tight-assed upbringing, to become unrestrainedly risk-inclined. As for me, I longed for a hot shower and my soft bed. But like Samantha I had cast my lot with the rabble and I would not abandon them.
Occupy Centennial Quad rolled on through day four. The site was becoming trammeled, dusty, unmistakably overcrowded, trending toward unruly, and smelling faintly of urine. More new tents had been pitched bearing dozens of fringe occupiers, some from out of town along for the thrill, perhaps with their own agendas. Classes went forward unabated, campus police were rarely visible, and the media crush of the past days had waned. Our social media team continued to blast information and pictures across a range of sites. But they could no longer claim Gilligan as the only campus occupation in the nation. Officials at Kanawha State University across the river in West Virginia announced that a small group of anti-fracking protestors had likewise occupied the Chesapeake Science and Engineering Complex in solidarity with their “sisters and brothers in Ohio”.
While Samantha and I sat quietly by our tent, the imaginations of many of those sisters and brothers had turned hyper-phobic, fretting about the ticking time bomb of our own making. By noon on the day-after-tomorrow, we, the leadership of this fiasco, were poised to go public with information the Redlaw administration feared would stain Gilligan’s good name, besmirch one of the university’s biggest donors, and set off statewide, if not national, political repercussions. Though the mass of occupiers was clueless about these ramifications, they were fully aware that the morning of October 31st was some kind of deadline.
In an Occupy Town Hall yesterday, Nick casually mentioned the date. But he avoided the frightening possibilities in this game of chicken. The information gap in turn led to wild speculation. From the tarps, tents, and yurts, the rumor mill ceaselessly churned. What was happening inside Stiggins Hall? Would the university capitulate? Or was the Redlaw administration determined to end the stalemate and order campus police to clear the Quad? Would the brass declare a state of emergency and order an armed lockdown of the campus? Would the governor intervene? Was Morse Valley Energy about to start drilling at Blackwood Forest? Nobody could definitively answer any of these questions. It was not as if one could Google Ohio National Guard: Daily Schedule for October 29th or locate a press release telegraphing President Redlaw’s real plans. Yet hundreds of bits of unverified data of uncertain provenance thrummed back and forth across the Quad, intensifying in direct proportion to occupiers’ anxieties, my own included, about how our parents might respond to pleas for bail.
Lost in my own apprehension, I became mute. In collusion with Greta and my friends in the Group of Thirteen, I was now playing Mata Hari in an improbable plot to hoodwink Dr. Tulkinghorn. I couldn’t help dwelling obsessively on my tawdry role. My performance and the impending deadline set off flights of butterflies doing laps in my gut. What if I let down these dedicated and dependent friends? What if the man is even more dastardly than we’ve anticipated? Swallowing hard against these fears, I willed myself to talk of other things.
“So, in ten words or less, how would you describe that professor you’re obsessively crushing on?”
“Ten words or less, hmm.” Samantha sheepishly smiled. “And what professor would that be?”
“The hunk with the intense blue eyes.”
“Oh, that one. Well, I’m no longer such a fangirl of that guy or of his big words and ideas, or of that, oh, what? that masculine sweetness that once stirred my juices. That guy?”
“Yep, that one.”
“Stefan. He has so weirded me out that I’m losing my head. Omega sends chills through me, Hannah. It’s the opposite of a healthy arousal. I ask myself: Am I becoming a geeky doomsayer?” She took a long breath. “But, ya know, in a heartbeat, I could be lovesick all over again.” Samantha’s lips opened again but there were no words, just a palpable in-breath, a slight headshake. “There, I confessed. It took much more than ten words.”
I smiled at her, feeling her bewilderment, a sensitivity I reserved for girlfriends. Calmly, I said, “Yeah, that says it all.” My voice may have been steady but inside I wrestled with my own little crush. How insane, those teeny emotions back then.
Samantha turned the conversation in a different direction. “You know, as I said in class this morning, omega reminds me of The Rapture.”
“Stefan didn’t exactly seize that idea and run with it,” I reminded her.
“I know. He always seems reluctant to talk about religion; he defaults to Rumi, a Muslim.” Samantha’s lips curled slightly. “And I saw people rolling their eyes. That Astrid, she’s a weirdo.”
“She’s her own person,” I allowed. “The rest of us are boring lumps. We’re bland and lifeless conformists. Astrid, though. Astrid rocks!”
“Not my impression. But I hardly know her. Anyway, back to The Rapture. In our senior high youth group, we had this contest: It was, like, who … WHO could read all the “Left Behind” novels first? There are something like sixteen of them. Being the pastor’s daughter, I raced through them. I was gonna win that contest. Trouble is, Missy Chambers, the twit, was a faster reader and just as I finished the fifteenth book, she announced she was done.”
“ ‘Left Behind’ novels? They got anything to do with the Left Behind Game?”
“Yes. We played that one endlessly. Our church is all The Rapture and getting saved before it arrives. When it does come, those who’ve been saved — the true believers in Christ — are supposed to immediately be zipped up into heaven. The others are all ‘left behind’, so to speak.”
“Then what? Late-K lunacy?” I wondered out loud.
“Yeah, sort of. With the Christians gone, the world becomes chaotic and awful, yeah, a lot like Late-K devolving toward omega. In this case, and this is very important to us rapture types, the world will be deceived by somebody who pretends to be the Messiah but is actually the exact opposite of Jesus. He’s the Antichrist, a trickster who lies to the people still on Earth. Then comes a time of tribulation, which basically is a chance for the lost souls to be saved before the actual end of the world — omega — and then the second coming of Christ, the conversion of the Jews and all that. It’s not alpha, though, because Jesus is then expected to waste the Earth.”
I felt nervous about where this conversation was heading. Finally, I had to ask, “You still believe this?”
“I’m conflicted. It’s right there in the Bible, you know, in Thessalonians and The Book of Revelation.”
“The Bible has a lot of stuff no one in their right mind could swallow. I was raised in a family that never went to church, let alone read the Bible. My dad is an atheist and my mom a washed-out Methodist. They don’t agree on much except they both deplore literal interpretations of the Bible and organized religion. On those things, they are joined at the hip. Anyway, that bit about the Bible is an opinion I got from their rants.”
“Not mine obviously or at least not mine in high school. I believed at that time that the Bible was God’s word. Now I’m a doubting backslider and I’m probably headed to hell. I’ll be one in the crowd left behind.”
“Not to worry, Samantha. I’ll be right there with you. And Argolis, Gilligan, Brights Grove, and all those other lovely communities will be — What did Nickleby say? — ‘crippled when the world hits bottom with a thud’. Maybe we’ll all end up living in hell-on-Earth, if we’re not dead.”
“What the f … fffudge! Hard to lighten up with that kind of a forecast and all the scary things driving it. That’s why I want a divorce from Dr. Friemanis.”
“But then,” I went on, “to keep you reading, Nickleby puts out the tiniest, little teeny ray of hope. Here …” I reached in the tent for my copy of Over the Cliff. “How about this to cheer you up?”
… stragglers may survive the shocks and anarchy, the influenzas, the gone world of their ancestors. In the bleak and depleted decades after omega they may begin to fashion a life …
“See, Sam, you and I need to find ways to survive as two strong women among those stragglers.”
“A like for you!” Samantha exclaimed and she cast a soft unreadable gaze back at me while uttering a muffled breathy sound as if her face were buried in a pillow. Quite unexpectedly, she reached across to draw me into a tentative hug which in time evolved into a warm and embarrassingly memorable embrace. Lost in Samantha’s billows, I reckoned we had sealed some sort of pact.
10
Rutherford Bosworth Hays guided his pickup into the FloMart gas station and convenience store in Jesphat, West Virginia. He filled the fuel tank, headed straight for the beer cooler, grabbed a twelve pack of Shawnee Lager, copped a pound of American cheese and a pack of ManCave beef jerky, and paid for everything in cash. Twenty years ago, he had disposed of the last of his credit cards. As a grower of an illegal crop, it made no sense to leave a trail of transactions. For more than a decade, a certain money manager in the weed industry had been cashing his military pension and disability checks. And it had been at least that long since he possessed a bank account.
He was also phobic about modern technology. He carried no cellular phone or mobile device, never browsed the Internet, and received his mail at a post office box. His quest for anonymity also extended to license plates, which he frequently switched (alternative plates being common in his trade), and to his clothing and appearance when shopping, which invariably took place after midnight at any one of a half-dozen big box stores across the river. His wife, Jo, behaved similarly, though neither of them qualified as true hermits. They did appear seasonally at the Argolis Farmers Market, after all, and at heart, Boss, if not Jo, was a gregarious if prickly beast. They both had had their fill of society with its commodification, cacophony, waste, and superficiality. Boss was fifty-nine; Jo, fifty-two. As they approached old age, the solitude of their remote farm in Grieg County deeply suited them. It was so isolated a stranger could never find it.
As Boss hinted in our class, his body of work included rural beautification projects. Under the expansive, triple-locked tonneau of his pickup on this evening were tools and supplies, purchased in small lots, to render such projects swift and untraceable: six head lamps, six pairs of night goggles, six pairs of leather gloves, a carton of boot covers, two military night vision binoculars, ten liters of high fructose corn syrup, a ten kilogram sack of aluminum oxide powder, three tubs of black salve, several coils of rope, a homemade hardwood owl caller, a TSCMD (technical surveillance counter measure device), a lock-pick tool set, a high speed portable drill, cans of spray paint of various colors, greenleaf camouflage netting, a 16 inch chain saw, a cordless cable cutter, three heavy duty wire cutters, several fence cutters and hack saws, a box of spikes of various lengths, four sledge hammers, a fully stocked mechanic’s tool box, and two cartons of cheese and peanut butter crackers.
Boss returned to his truck and headed north on 97, a little traveled West Virginia highway paralleling the historic river. He relaxed at the wheel. The air whistled through the driver’s window, his arm jutting into the cool night. With one eye on the highway, the other on the western sky at dusk where light shot through drifting cirrus clouds of red-orange and magenta, Boss decided it was one helluva pretty night for mischief. He felt exhilarated by the bracing autumn air thrumming up the asphalt in his old pickup toward the forested hills across the river. As always on night-time adventures, his biorhythms exuded peril, which then brought to his heart a delight of such purity he could hardly describe it. He could only conclude that most of life’s ecstasies, including sex, burst upon him raw and sensual, fraught with imminence and risk, rising in his throat, tightening across his chest, churning his loins, timeless and transcendent.
He remembered he was a bit hungry and mighty thirsty. Steering the truck with his knees, he pulled a strip of jerky from the packet, slapped on a slice of cheese, and washed it down with the first of many beers. By his own reckoning, though roughly as emotionally mature as your average twenty-year-old, Boss’ ageing body imposed limits: no ladder work, for example; no explosives (can’t run fast enough); no firearms (damned glasses always lost); and absolutely no high speed chases (fuckin' truck's got 250 thousand on it). Despite these limitations, his need to set things straight in these beleaguered hills still smoldered hot, quickened his pulse, kick-started his adrenalin. He drank another beer as he drove along at the posted speed limit toward the appointed place.
~
In the darkening evening at the southeastern corner of Centennial Quad, across the street from The Eclipse Coffee Company, a gaggle of women including me, engaged in heated conversation. “Well, she wasn’t invited,” asserted one. “Yeah, but who invited you?” another retorted. “Will she be able to hold a life secret?” asked a third. And finally, I said, “Let me explain.” That was how Samantha Ostrom, anxiously waiting across the street, was invited to join Melissa, Astrid, Abby, Em, and me as we gathered for our rendezvous with Rutherford Bosworth Hays. After the decision, Samantha ran across the street, hugging each of us, and assuring us we wouldn’t regret having a strong tall woman on board. “I have Amazonian strength and stamina,” she boasted.
At that point, Katherine walked up as if she had accidentally stumbled upon us.
“Hi everybody!” she greeted us in a whisper. “I will serve as your Argolis backup. I have two things to say. One, if you are successful, you will give us breathing space and that is space we desperately need. Two, please hand me your cell phones. I will disable your location service. The phones will be in my safe hands in Argolis which will substantiate alibis I hope you will never need. Finally, I wish you best of luck and am ever so grateful for your courage. You are all more valiant than I … by a long shot.” With our phones in her backpack, Katherine said no more and vanished into the shadows of Weary Hall.
~
Boss checked his watch: nine-thirty sharp. His conspirators would be here any minute. Unless they chickened-out. The night was pitch-black under the canopy of the forest, our meeting place a dead-end track a mile off Chestnut Ridge Road and seven miles from the site of the evening’s project. Boss noted, to his great satisfaction, stars scattered in their billions like dust. No light pollution. The fracking site had not been activated. He sat on the tailgate of his truck, his legs dangling, a third lager at hand, contemplating all the things that could go wrong. For the moment, but for the shrill whinny of a screech owl in the far distance, the countryside was as peaceful and still as a nunnery at bedtime. Or so he imagined. As he chugged the last of his beer, he heard an engine, saw headlights playing over the trees, juddering up and down, illuminating tree tops one moment, the rutted track the next. Boss’ first reaction was to brace himself for a sheriff’s cruiser. Not to worry, his band of pranksters had arrived. Melissa brought her car to a stop and we jumped out and surrounded him with anxious chatter.
“Ladies, ladies,” Boss rasped. “Welcome to the Blackwood Forest Expeditionary Force. Now, who’s in charge tonight?”
We looked blankly at each other. “We’re all in charge,” Abby said a bit too stridently.
“Speak softly, for Christ’s sake,” Boss commanded.
“Wait, no.” Abby corrected herself. “You’re in charge, Boss. Your name is your role. We’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Is this the twenty-first century, the century when we’ll elect a woman president?” Boss asked rhetorically. “And you’re willing to be under the command of a late middle-aged anarchist farmer with few leadership skills and a history of sexist thoughts and behaviors?”
We nodded sheepishly. Melissa said, “She’s right, Boss. We’re all novices.”
“Alright then. Cain't say I didn’t warn you. We’ll leave the car here. Melissa and who? Abby — that’s you who said my name is my role, right?”
“Good memory”, she replied.
“Better'n you’d expect,” he replied, pointing at and naming each of us until he got to Samantha. “Now here’s som'on I don’t believe I’ve met.”
“This is Samantha”, I said. “We agreed she could join us tonight.”
Boss took a step toward her and shook her hand. “Okay Samantha, ready for some mischief?”
Stunned by the strength of his rough grip, she dropped her hand, shaking it covertly, and straightened up. “Yes, sir!”
“Melissa and Abby, you ride in the cab o' my truck. The rest'll squeeze into the back. We’ll proceed out onto Chestnut Ridge Road. About six point five miles up the hill, near the top of the ridge, we’ll pull off onto a loggin' road and creep like Indians to an opening in the forest. That should give us an unobstructed view of the site. From here onward, pardon my language, not one more fucking sound. Please.”
Abby, the only one with even the vaguest notion of what it meant to “creep like an Indian”, whispered that she was trying not to overanalyze Boss’ simile. Was it a compliment or a slur? I couldn’t say in this muddled age of savage desires, Redskins and Chiefs in stadiums, wampum spilling out of the Native American gaming industry. Abby, the only Native American I’ve ever known, spilled her guts to me more than once. The long and short of it is that native identity has been seriously abused and undermined.
Looking more and more petrified, we began to do what we had been told. “Wait. Wait!” Boss ordered. “Before you climb aboard, rub this blackening salve over your exposed skin — face, neck, ears, wrists. Er, except for Em there; she’s got natural protection against the night.”
Em responded with a smile. “An African woman of the night,” she quipped, oblivious to the double entendre. Boss looked across at Em and wondered. Jo alleged her husband had no concept of the word discretion but Boss believed that she underestimated him. Now he was mute.
After a long pause, he continued. “When you’ve blackened yourself, everybody put on these here gloves, a beret, a headlamp, and a pair of black boot covers that leave untraceable prints.”
He demonstrated how to blacken their skin and distributed lamps, gloves, hats, and boots. We salved and suited up, our guts roiling with nervous anticipation. Boss took stock of us and no doubt worried. Before climbing into the driver’s seat, he needed to tell us one more thing. In a deadly serious tone, he said, “This will be your last chance to opt out. If you’re having doubts about your decision, now would be the time to hop off and wait for us to return. Is anybody scared shitless?”
“Well, I suppose we all are, in varying degrees,” offered Astrid in her academic voice, as though she were critiquing a journal article.
“Mon Dieu, oui!” came an anxious whisper from Em.
Melissa nodded. “You got that right.”
“Anybody scared so shitless they need to stay behind?” Boss asked sharply.
Nobody stirred.
“Okay then. Let’s move out.”
We drove to the turnoff and bumped along the logging track into thick scrub. Everyone disembarked into a small clearing tangled at the edges with grape vines, honeysuckle, sumac, and poison ivy. Boss three-pointed the truck to face back toward the road and parked it against the tangle. From his tool box, he gathered the implements and supplies we would need and set them on the ground, his head lamp illuminating an array of things that most of us were unable to see clearly let alone identify. He distributed a few items to each of us — wire cutters here, spray paint there, corn syrup everywhere — and he told us to stow the stuff in our packs. He took the rest. He then led Melissa, Em, and Samantha, the tallest, to the side of the truck. From the cab he extracted a large leaf-camouflaged green net. Together, in silence, they covered the truck.
The night was charged with luminous starlit energy pulsing from every rock and perturbation, every dip and hollow, every ghostly tree and shrub, and extending eternally in all directions beneath the speckled sky, sheltering us in expectant silence. We shouldered our packs. Along a faint deer path, we tip-toed single file. Samantha, followed Boss. Just behind her, I stumbled over a rock, letting out a muffled squawk as I fell forward and avoided a face plant by grabbing Samantha’s backpack. Both of us toppled into the brush. Boss looked back disgustedly. We disengaged ourselves from multiflora rose and berry canes, readjusted our packs, and swept debris off our asses. Unharmed but for scratches, we did our best to stifle giggles. In the event, our sisterhood deepened. The others wanted to know what happened.
“Keep your voices down,” Boss grumbled. “This ain’t no walk in the woods.”
He waved us onward. We climbed upslope. As we reached a brink of some kind, the forest opened. Ahead, a scarp dropped 300 feet into the darkness. Coarse orange-tinted sandstone rocks, laid down 300 million years ago when Appalachian Ohio was the shoreline of an inland sea, marked this sharp edge. Though no trees or vegetation grew on the ancient rock, there were treacherous crevasses between the boulders with shrubs and vines providing ambiguous definitions of the border between ridge top and cliff face.
He directed us to gather into a tight wedge, to lower onto our bellies, and to follow him, snaking his way to the edge of the largest and flattest of the boulders. He signaled us to reorder ourselves and sit in a semi-circle so that each had a view of the drill site 300 feet away and far below. We squinted into the darkness to behold the sleeping countryside.
11
“Take a moment to let your eyes adjust,” Boss whispered. “We’re sitting on a ridge just south of Blackwood Forest. See that dark patch off on the northern horizon? That’s Blackwood. Now direct your eyes eastward, to the right.”
“See them lights?”
We nodded in the darkness. There were two roadside arc lights on posts.
“Them lights're either side of the main gate. We’re lucky they ain’t fired up any other lights tonight. Means there’s no night work going on. After we douse the gate lights, we’ll be able to work in the dark, assuming they haven’t installed motion-activated lights or employed a watchman. Now, let me have a closer look.” From his pack, Boss removed his pair of military night vision binoculars. He studied the gate. Then he scanned the perimeter fence, the interior of the site, and the country road that led to it.
“I’d say there’s nobody down there now. That don’t mean they’re not visiting the site from time to time or watching it remotely. When we’re closer, I’ll see if I can detect surveillance systems. If they’ve got 'em, we’ll have to take them out and do our business right quick. If not, then we’ll need to be alert for the sheriff, a security company, whatever.”
Scanning the drill site, the size of three football fields, we could only vaguely discern what looked like a vast cleared parking lot harboring countless dark forms — structures, construction equipment, vehicles. Using his night vision binoculars, as if jotting items on a grocery list, Boss rapturously described what he was seeing.
“Whole damn thing is a sacrilege,” he cursed. “Wish't I’d the nerve for explosives … Well, shit! Look at that. Right near the gate, a modular building, got to be the office. Wonder what’s inside? Right near, yep. There’s the control van with the satellite dish. Be fun to put that sucker to sleep. Hey, look at all them well-casings laid out round the perimeter! Drill a bunch o' holes in them babies. Yeah! And there, them're the portable lighting towers and the portable potties. Portable this, portable that: bust 'em up quicker'n you can say ‘power to the women’. Yowser! Three bulldozers! Cut wires, slash hoses, put 'em to rest. And hmm, six flatbed tractor trailers loaded with drilling equipment. Too big to deal with. Tower'll soon rise 100 feet above the site. A fuckin' sacrilege!” he repeated.
The more Boss became animated by the possibilities, the more we became dubious about the wisdom of this mission. Melissa muttered, “What were we thinking?” Abby, at her side, replied, “Take courage, mum.”
“Let’s see,” Boss rolled on. “Holy moly: another gob of flatbeds with big plastic tanks. Don’t puncture those bad boys. Fracking fluid. Touch that stuff, yer a dead duck. Oh yeah, now! Lookee there: lined up outside the gate, at least ten sand tankers and a shitload of other targets. Hey girls, we are gonna make history! I’ll tell you this, we’re also damned lucky. This site’s jus' ripe for a little mayhem. Any later, it’d be life-threatening to mess with.”
He ordered each of us to look through the night vision binoculars. We passed them around. Then he asked, “Who could not make hide nor hair of what you saw?” Of the six of us, four raised hands.
“Okay, good,” he replied. “That leaves Abby and Hannah. For you two the scene popped clearly into place, right?”
We agreed. “Okay, we’ll set you up near the bottom of this here cliff. There’s a rocky ledge with good sightlines within earshot of the drill pad. I’ll explain your job when we get there.”
Boss rose and signaled us to retreat away from the cliff. My jitters were palpable. He found a well-worn path that switched back and forth along the cliff’s steep eastern flanks. We proceeded downward to the ledge where he would leave Abby and me. Directing his attention to us, he handed us each the night vision binoculars. “Now listen. Your work’s gonna be key tonight. You won’t be directly involved in the beautification of this industrial tract. But the safety of the rest of us and the success of this mission will depend on your sharp eyes and communication.”
We stood stone still. Some pair. Our blackened faces were frozen in death stares — what our contemporaries in those days might have labeled “RBFs,” meaning “Resting Bitch Faces”, our mouths curled downward, brows furrowed, lips tense and tight. But nobody was in an ironic mood that night. We hadn’t just put on those faces. We were terrified.
“Set yerselves up right here, comfortable as can be,” Boss reassured us like a fondly grand-dad. “Constantly scan the site, one of you the left half, the other the right. Pay attention to the periphery where there may be off-site watchers. Don’t for a minute stop your surveillance. Hannah, you are responsible for communicating what you both see, or don’t see, to the rest of us. That’s what this owl caller is for.” He handed me a beautifully carved and burnished flute-like instrument.
He handed the caller to me. I turned it over and over, relishing the balance and feel of it. “Did you make this?”
“Shore did,” he replied with obvious pride. He gently took the caller back. “Here, lemme show you how to use it.” After a deep in-breath, with his fingers at the openings, as if performing on a piccolo, he pursed his lips, delicately releasing his breath into the caller in three short spurts. Out the other end came the haunting, resonant call of the Barred Owl, referred to as the Hoot Owl in these parts: The familiar Who-who … Who, who, who-whoooo. In the darkness, I could detect a smile escaping the corners of his mustachioed mouth. The call sent shivers down my spine.
“You try,” he said.
My first attempts were risible, nothing like an owl. “Purse your mouth more tightly,” Boss instructed. “Middle finger covers the small hole for the first two hoots; index finger over the big hole for the second set.”
On the seventh try, I began to sound like a tentative owl. On the tenth, Boss clasped my shoulder and whispered, “Okay, you got it. Best Hoot Owl Gilligan ever produced.” The others gesticulated silently, thumbs up around. I took in Abby’s broad indigenous smile gleaming through her smudged face, easing the tension of the moment, my woodsy audition.
“Now pay attention. This is important,” Boss commanded. “Here are the signals: One full”, cupping his hands, he called: “Who-who … Who, who, who-whoooo. One full call like that means the coast is clear. Two full calls, quickly rendered, then repeated once, means danger, take cover.” He demonstrated again. “One full call from you back at us means all clear, resume your work. Three calls from you, again in rapid succession, is a crisis: it’s a distress signal, meaning you need help. Whatever your signal, each time you call, I will respond with a fox call indicating that your message has been received. If we hear nothing from you, it just means that you see nothing to report. In other words, all quiet means no problem at the moment.”
Boss cupped his hands again and sort of screeched through them. To us, the sound was high-pitched, like a child in distress. He repeated it for emphasis, saying simply, “Fox call: received your message.”
Finally, he said, “When we have completed our work, I will signal with four separate fox calls. You acknowledge with the all-clear call, which is?”
“One full call”, replied Abby. I nodded.
At Boss’ request, I hooted through the signals again, one by one, and Boss quizzed each of the others on their meaning. After several repetitions, when the countryside had been flush with owl sounds, Boss took the caller and made one last set of calls, aiming his hoots northward. Somewhere in the far distance, away on the darkest night of October, at the very edge of Blackwood Forest, we heard a reply. Boss called again. The owl responded again. And again and again. We froze in reverence: this dialogue across the countryside, across species. All went still, Boss moving not a muscle. We sensed the faintest waft of feathers on a wingspan of thirty-five inches. The owl descended. She perched stealthily on a branch above us, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, scrutinizing us, saucer eyes judging our mettle. In time, she expanded her chest and across the landscape she hooted the all clear signal. Her call hung there in the stillness of the night.
Then, she swooped back away toward the fated forest.
Boss whispered a prayer of supplication. “Sister owl, ohhh sistah owl! We implore thee: Bring us great good fortune. Bring us humble accomplishment. And guide us safely home.”
Into the sacred space he had created, he solemnly rose, his head bowed. We followed suit. Before departing the ledge, the others lined up to hug Abby and me. Impatient with this sisterly waste of time, Boss reminded us to never — ever — remove our gloves, nor to spit or exhale on any surface, nor scratch our skin, and finally to keep our berets firmly over our hair. With that, they departed. The last bit of the trail required a backside-slide down a steep section of loose rock and sand. They dusted-off and marched toward the gate.
12
When the insurgents approached the gate, Boss shined his light on a series of warning signs. He read them out loud with commentary.
Live Wellsite. STOP. High Pressure Gas. “Gas my ass.”
Poison Gas Present. “No shit, Captain Obvious.”
Personal Protection Equipment Required in this Location.
“Fuckers.”
Notice: Authorized Personnel Only. “We ARE authorized,
dickheads.”
Danger: No Smoking. “No problem. We’re all pure and innocent.”
Caution: Do Not Drink Water. “No chance in hell.”
“See what we’re dealing with here?”
“Crap. Should we even be crossing into this place?” Melissa whispered.
“It’ll be fine. Site’s not live yet.” Boss flicked off his light. “Squat in that there ditch,” he commanded, pointing toward the edge of the gravel driveway leading up to the gate. “Reconnaissance time. I’ll scope the perimeter, check for surveillance systems, find the best way through the chain-link. Keep your ears and eyes alert.” With his surveillance sensing device in hand, he advanced in a crouch, ghosting toward the gate.
Back on our ledge, Abby, fixed her glasses on the perimeter fence. Seeing nothing but Boss creeping around it, she whispered, “Think we should issue an all-clear?”
“No. Remember no signal means no worries.” I scanned the interior, saw no movement.
Abby saw Boss abruptly drop to the ground.
“He’s heard something!”
Scoping the road, both of us saw a blurry figure at the dark edge of a pasture where the driveway met the road. It was too dark and distant to discern.
“Danger!” Abby stuttered. I sent two quick calls across the night.
Boss called his response and scrambled under a brushy clump. Twenty yards back, the women hunkered low.
Abby focused her glasses on the verge between the road and the pasture. The form emerged from a patch of dried goldenrod. It crossed the road. “Deer,” she whispered.
I sent out an all-clear. A fox call replied. The other women rose to their haunches. Boss ghosted his way further along the fence. Fifteen minutes later, he returned. “So far as I can tell,” he told them, “site has no remote surveillance and no motion activated lights. Decided not to take out lights at the gate. Could get us into trouble if somebody drives up. Found a weak patch about halfway around the west side of the fence; some brush there to cover the cut. That’ll give us a place to crawl in. Now foller me.”
Astrid, Samantha, Em, and Melissa dropped into single file behind Boss. Within minutes, he had cut a gap in the fence and they were on site. From our perch, Abby and I watched Boss animatedly directing the women. He split them into two groups. Boss, with Melissa and Em, headed straight for the office structure, Astrid and Samantha toward the flatbeds. We continued nervously scanning the perimeter.
“Let’s see if we can get inside this place,” Boss said as the three approached the office. He checked for wires, found none, and out of his pocket pulled his locksmith tools. In a jiffy, the door swung open. “Way too easy,” he said. “Ah, no wonder. Nothin' in here yet, nothin' of importance anyway.” His headlamp illuminated a desk and office chair, a filing cabinet, wastebasket, and coffee maker. Checking drawers and wall shelves and the adjacent bathroom, he said, “Not a freaking thing here, not even toilet paper.”
“Okay, you guys, pick up that desk and chair and carry 'em out the door.” When they had done so, he said, “Now, let’s have some fun.” From his pack, he chose two short-handled sledge hammers and two pairs of safety glasses, handing them to Melissa and Em. “Put on those glasses now and see if you can bust these things to pieces.”
In short order, Em and Melissa had rendered the furniture into a pile of scrap. “That was satisfying,” Melissa concluded. “Big waste,” Em retorted with disgust. “When I see all the waste in this country, I compare to Senegal. People there would make use of meubles, like these, eh? Les Americains sont vraiment déraisonables!”
“We’re one hell of a long way from Senegal,” Melissa responded without asking for a translation.
“C’est vrai, that is so”, Em admitted, a profound sadness in her whisper.
They joined Boss in the van. He had broken the drivers-side window, gained access. Like a berserk electrician, he yanked and snipped wiring beneath and alongside a control panel that might have launched a missile but instead was meant to set off explosives and control drilling. “Sledge anything you like,” he invited the others. He exited the van and climbed onto its roof. With a small crowbar, he yanked the satellite dish free of its moorings, cut wires, and slung it to the ground.
They moved to the bulldozers. With tools meant for this work, Boss demonstrated. He cut wires, sawed through a fuel line, hacked open hydraulic hoses, hammered at levers on the control panel. Handing over his tools, he told them to disable the other dozers. “Have a ball. You pro'lly ain’t never gonna have a chance to do this again.”
Astrid and Samantha meanwhile worked their way across the flatbeds, spray-painting each of the frack-fluid tanks with messages such as:
NO CIVILIZATION WORTH ITS SALT
WOULD INJECT POISON INTO ITS VEINS.
WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS IN HERE? TELL US, YOU BASTARDS.
ANCESTORS OF THE DELAWARE ARE PLANNING REVENGE.
H2O PLUS THIS STUFF = DEATH (with a skull and crossbones)
FRACKERS ARE CRIMINALS.
And many others, Astrid’s fertile mind churning out copy faster than either of them could paint.
Boss, Melissa, and Em came across to the flatbeds to help with messaging. After the tanks had been labeled, Boss gathered the four women for a lesson. “Now we want to mess with each of these here trucks. Watch what I do.” He proceeded to the front of the big rigs attached to the flatbeds. He climbed on the running board, smashed the driver’s side window, climbed aboard to release the mammoth hood covering the engine. He found and pulled the dipstick from the engine and from his pack removed a funnel and poured a cup or so of the finely powdered aluminum oxide down into the crankcase. “Alright!” he happily exclaimed. “This’ll cause this engine to seize up before they can git to New Barnstable. But just in case, we’ll also dump a liter of corn syrup to mix with the diesel.” He hopped down and walked around to the back of the cab, snapped the lock on the fuel tank with a hammer and plumber’s wrench, and poured a half-container of syrup into the tank. He repeated the process on the other side into a second tank. Fully satisfied, he explained, “Carbon from the sugars in this stuff will build up on the engine’s cylinder walls and rings and will also cause these babies to belch and run poorly or seize like Grandpa’s wicked constipation back in fifty-four, the sacred year of my birth.”
1954? Astrid computed. Holy shit, this guy’s almost sixty.
“Okay team, get to work on the rest of these rigs!” When the work had been completed, the four found boss at the casings making holes with his portable high-speed industrial drill. He stopped and told them, “We ain’t got time to do them all. This is just to let them know we have more imagination than they can imagine. Now go ahead and spray some of that fluorescent orange around these holes. Maybe make an arrow so's they don’t overlook our skill and craftsmanship.” He then randomly drilled another few dozen lengths of pipe, telling them, “These here holes are for them to discover. Means they have to inspect every pipe, more or less. Diabolical bastard, I am. We don’t want 'em driving any of these into the ground any time soon.”
At that moment, Em, who had been posted at the gate to listen, saw headlights in the distance just as she heard two quickly repeated calls from the ledge. She ran to Boss.
“Hannah hoots!” she exclaimed. “Danger, danger! Un véhicule s’approche de la porte.”
Boss, dredging up an apposite response from his rusty Vietnamese French, replied in a civilized voice nobody had ever heard, “Merci, madamoiselle! and called sharply toward us.
Unwittingly, the insurgents then made two mistakes.
Boss knew that they had only a minute or two to get out of sight. He signaled the women to duck walk to the fence. On their knees, they scrambled along the fence to the opening and, one-by-one, crouch-ran across a mowed patch to a brushy fence line. If they could get to the other side, there would be cover. Under pressure, he instructed them to vault over and through barbed wire, lie flat in the underbrush on the other side. They obeyed his command. He heard a faint, “Ouch!”
Shit, one of these women’s been scratched by rusty barbed wire. Just as the thought crossed Boss’ brain, he realized his first mistake — that not ten feet to his left was a collapsed gate through which everyone could have passed unscathed. No time for a do-over. He scurried through the opening, dropped to his belly, and pulled out his binoculars. Looking back to the main gate, he saw a black and yellow Dodge Charger pull up. It made a wide circle and faced outward. Two deputies emerged. Each lit up a cigarette. “No smoking, you fuckers,” Boss whispered to himself. One officer casually inspected the lock on the gate, the other flicked on an LED flashlight and swept the beam around the fencing.
Boss whispered to Em, “We’re sunk if they see the pile of office stuff or read the messages on those tanks.”
“Merde!”
“Oui, merde.”
The beam made casual passes around the perimeter of the site, the officer looking for intruders, unusual movement. The cruiser radio blasted a scratchy message. “Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight: Pickup truck off road on seven-four-three. Ten miles west of drill pad. Medivac on the way.” The officer flicked off his flashlight and hurried after his fellow deputy to the cruiser. They squelched their cigarettes, jumped in, activated the strobe lights, and screeched down the driveway.
“Dodged a bullet,” Boss said to the others as I issued the all-clear. “Who got scratched?”
“It was me,” Samantha said. “It’s really nothing; ripped this arm of my t-shirt — a small scratch,” she said pointing to her elbow.”
“Is it bleeding?”
“Not now.”
“Okay, don’t touch the wound and don’t remove your gloves. Go get a tetanus booster tomorrow.”
This is when Boss made his second mistake. Had he been thinking clearly, he would have hauled out immediately, satisfied with the night’s accomplishments and aware that they had been fortunate to escape notice. But Boss being Boss could not resist the pictures in his head of toppled portalets, busted light towers, and flat tires across the site.
Instead of leaving immediately, he announced, “We’ve got time for a few finishing touches. I’ll return to the site. Melissa and Astrid come with me. Samantha and Em make your way back to Abby and Hannah. Wait for us there.”
Just as Melissa and Astrid had tipped the last of the portalets, Astrid quipping, “This could lead to some serious constipation,” they heard three owl calls in rapid succession, repeated a second time. Boss, at the other side of the lot, banging away at tires, failed to pick up the signal. Astrid bolted across the site toward him. She shook his shoulder, “Distress call coming from the ledge!”
“Aw, damn!” Boss returned a quick fox call and grabbed Astrid by the elbow. “Quick! Go get Melissa and meet me outside the fence.” He gathered his tools, stopped momentarily to clip wires on a light tower, and ran to the cut.
In less than five minutes, all three were outside the fence charging full speed toward the ledge. As they approached, Boss fox-called again. I returned with a single owl response. The three slowed to a trot and stopped at the scree slope. Hearing us on the ledge above, Boss let out a sigh of relief. Nobody missing. “Why the distress?” he called up.
“Come up,” I replied in hushed tones.
They climbed up in single file: Boss and Melissa, followed by Astrid. Astrid heard Boss, exclaim, “Holy shit!” and Melissa say, “Criminy Jane!”
“What is it?” Astrid gasped.
She clambered up onto the ledge to find Samantha, Abby, Em and me sitting in a little circle, all in lotus position, calm as the night wind. Gradually, as Asrid’s eyes adjusted, she perceived a form in Samantha’s lap: a toddler, a girl of no more than two and some months perhaps, in soiled footie pajamas, not stirring a muscle, sound asleep, her eyes behind lids with long curled lashes: an angelically proportioned waif, a Blackwood Forest emissary, a caramel-colored spirit being.
“Wherefore this angel?” she asked, calling up an ancient sage of some sort.
“We have no fucking idea,” replied Samantha, her pastor-kid vocabulary fading in direct proportion to her emerging authenticity. She tenderly stroked the girl’s matted hair.
“Where'd it … she come from?” repeated Boss. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“You’re telling me,” I said. “We totally freaked-out when we heard rustling up the trail behind us. That’s when I issued the distress call. Then we heard gurgles and she came around the corner, toddled up, and sat down on that rock, unfazed like a little Buddha. She’s got lots of words. Most of them we can’t understand. And we couldn’t coax her to tell us where home might be. She seems to be calling herself Missy or Mazie or Macy.”
“Look at her! All scratches and bruises,” Samantha said, taking hold of the child’s little hands.
“My God, what a complication!” Melissa exclaimed.
“You ain’t just shittin',” Boss agreed.
“What should we do?” Em inquired. “Un petite fille sans maman. Très tragique!”
Expectantly, Em looked to Boss. He was mute, gazing blankly from woman to woman. He and Jo had never borne children. His history with children in Vietnam, as he confessed to our class, was horrendous. He had zero experience in looking after a live toddler. “Shit”, he repeated to himself shaking his head in confusion, his brain grappling with scenes of blood seeping from little corpses floating in rice paddies.
Astrid jumped into the breach. “We’ve got to get out of here! The sheriff may be back soon. Even if not, we need to vamoose. Look, I have no idea where this little girl came from. We don’t have time to find out. And we can’t just drop her off with the authorities, looking the way we do, having done what we just did. We’ve got no choice but to take her along with us. There will be something on line tonight or tomorrow about a missing child and somebody can bring her back. Meanwhile, she’s ours.”
“That stands to reason, as long as we’re not caught and charged with kidnapping,” Melissa said. “I know a thing or two about children. I would be the logical person to take her. But in my nosey neighborhood and with my own kids, the word would get out faster than you can say ‘power to the women’.” Melissa cast a look towards Boss. Still stupefied, he ignored her pilfered phrase. Of no one in particular, she asked, “Do you think this little waif could be sheltered in the village or in somebody’s house until tomorrow? I mean it would be for only a few hours.”
“What other choice do we have?” I asked.
“None,” replied Samantha. Taking the lead, she rose gingerly and began trudging up the trail, the child still asleep in her arms. The rest of us followed, Boss shambling along at the back. When we arrived at his truck, he broke out of his trance. He directed the unfurling and stowing of the camo and the return of his equipment and supplies. We climbed into the truck and proceeded with caution and without headlights back to Chestnut Ridge Road and the rendezvous site. It was after midnight.
Boss said, “Instead of taking the most direct route back to Argolis, follow me. I know the back roads that head north. We’ll cross the river up near Stiles Creek and then stay in West Virginia on 533 and 97 all the way south. Cross back over into Ohio at Jesphat. It will take longer, but there’s less chance of being stopped.”
Two hours later, when Melissa pulled up to The Eclipse Coffee Company, the child had begun to stir and whimper. She was hungry.
“Hush little baby, don’t you cry/Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby,” sang Samantha, rocking the girl in her arms.
“Mama?” I asked.
With apologies, Em and Abby departed for their tents, leaving Astrid, Samantha, and me with the child at the edge of the occupy village. It was deathly quiet, no campus cops in sight. Astrid went straight to the food tent, gathered bread, cereal and milk. She returned to our tent. Inside, Frank and Nick snored in synchrony. The food quieted the little girl. She then proceeded on a solo expedition zigging around adjacent tents toward the food station.
“This isn’t going to work,” Astrid insisted. “This kid will become obvious. Campus police will notice. Then what?”
“What can we do?” Samantha wondered aloud.
“I have an idea,” Astrid said.
Samantha picked up the child.
13
TESTIMONY OF ADRIENNE FOSTER
Preamble
In a philosophy class on rhetoric I learned about testimony. A testimony is a person’s oral or written account of an event or state of affairs. A testimony has meaning and force not only because of its content and logic but also by the conclusions that are drawn. If I could, I would legally swear to this testimony, but under the circumstances I cannot do so. Events and people here could also be verified by witnesses whom I could supply. However, because time is of the essence and given my current limitations, I beg the reader to trust my judgment in the chronology that follows (matters of fact), the conclusions I draw, and the matters of opinion and actions that lead logically from them.
Matters of Fact
1. On October 15th of this year, I accompanied Mr. Jasper Morse from Argolis, Ohio USA to a then unknown destination. Ours was a sexual liaison for which he paid. Such encounters had occurred five times in the past twelve months. On all previous occasions, he drove me to his cabin in Bartholomew County, Ohio. This time, with no forewarning, he drove us to his corporate jet at the airport in Parkersburg, West Virginia and we were flown through the night to a tropical destination which turned out to be his vacation home on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He told me that we would be keeping a low profile for several days. I had no means of communication with the outside world. I felt like a prisoner, admittedly in a spectacular villa overlooking the ocean.
2. On the third night, October 17th, it was obvious after dinner that we would have sex for the first time. Mr. Morse favored forms of BDSM, which had occasionally felt threatening. But I had previously held my own without serious consequences. This time, far from home, I sensed I was in for something more challenging. I therefore wrote a letter that day to Lara Hedlund at Gilligan University of Ohio. The letter informed her of my location and my fears about Morse’s intentions. I asked Mr. Morse’s chef, Josephine, to mail it for me from Charlotte Amalie. I assume she did.
3. What happened that night of October 17th was an encounter so violent and degrading that I can only think of it as murderous rape. All my conditioning and judo training, my only defenses against a man more than twice my weight, went for naught when I slipped on a rug and he pounced and ravaged me. Afterwards I was so bruised and bleeding, so damaged as a woman that I could hardly get off the floor. When I managed to do so and realized he had left the room, I forced my concussed brain to focus on escaping. I could not survive another attack. I staggered across the patio and into the garden outside his room. It was pitch dark. I blacked out in the grass. How long, I cannot say. When I awoke, a girl, probably Jacinta, Josephine’s daughter, was at my side. Although she did not see what had happened she must have heard my screams and she must have realized, even in the dark, how battered I was. She helped me get on my feet, but perhaps she then heard Morse stir inside the house. She ran away. I wobbled dizzily. I got sick. I staggered away from the villa. Instead of aiming toward the front gate, disoriented, I headed in the direction of the cliffs.
4. I have no memory of falling. My rescuers told me I was fortunate to have fallen into deep water (about 10 meters deep) rather than onto rocks or the small beach. Already battered and semi-conscious, the smack of the water was indescribable. It knocked the wind out of me but also brought me to full consciousness. From the impact my left knee was sprained and my right shoulder dislocated. A small bone in my left ankle was also chipped or fractured; it may have happened during the rape as did a fracture of my nose and cheek bone. So far, I have no hearing in my right ear.
5. What I remember from the impact onward is plunging deeply toward the ocean floor. The water rushed past me at an astonishing rate, washing up and over me, enveloping me. I remember taking in mouthfuls of seawater. I tried unsuccessfully to determine which way was up but I was disoriented and weak. Even if I could find “up” I was not sure I had the strength to get to the surface. I was wasting energy thrashing about and feeling delirious for oxygen; my ears were popping and my world was darkening. I was on the brink of passing out and giving up hope when I hit the sandy bottom and looked up. Despite my damaged leg, I pushed upward. I took in more seawater but then I remembered to hold my breath and allowed myself to rise. After what seemed an eternity, I broke the surface and drew my first breath, the sweetest of my life. I then puked up seawater and what remained of the contents of my stomach. I was alive. I kept afloat with my good arm and uninjured leg. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I spotted the white buoy to which the yacht had been attached. The yacht was gone. I slowly made my way toward the buoy and hung on for life.
6. Toward dawn, I found myself losing focus and weakening. I feared passing out and losing my grasp. There were thunderheads in the distance and occasional flashes of lightning. At that point, with alarm, I noted dorsal fins coming toward me. I assumed sharks. Had my blood attracted them? Several seemed to be encircling me and one came very close. I froze in fear. Much to my relief, I realized that, as these huge creatures surfaced, I was being encircled by dolphins not sharks. Then one, perhaps the alpha, circled within a meter of me. I submerged for a moment to come face to face with him. I could hear him communicating with the others, the clicks and clacks and whistles of their language. When I resurfaced, I saw the running lights of a fishing boat coming my way. They heard my calls and pulled me from the water. I had survived.
7. Later I was told the pod of dolphins had guided and escorted the fishermen from several kilometers at sea toward shore. They said it was not the first time dolphins had helped them rescue a human at sea.
8. Before my rescue, I would have been cynical about unconditional kindness and generosity flowing from such men as the captain of this vessel and his crew. Keep in mind that before the plunge, I was clothed only in underwear and a shawl. After I hit the water my bra and shawl were torn from my body. My rescuers, black Caribbeans all, pulled an almost naked bruised and bloody white woman out of the sea. They immediately rushed to their quarters to find blankets and garments for me. Then they carried me tenderly to one of their bunks. For hours, I lay in a semi-comatose state. By the afternoon of October 18th, I was able take some food and liquid and I began to try to bridge the cultural and language gaps between myself and the Creole-speaking captain, Eduardo Bailey. Instead of continuing to fish, he decided to change his course to return to his home port of St. Eustatius (Statia). He understood that I needed medical attention. The journey took the rest of that day. In the week since arriving in Statia, I have received emergency medical attention and have been nurtured on the pathway to physical health thanks to Eduardo Bailey’s family, especially his wife Anna-Elisabet and their four children. My mental and emotional health will take longer to recover — if ever. I have begged Eduardo and others who know about me to refrain from notifying authorities. So far, they have agreed. Though this places them at risk, at all costs, I want Jasper Morse to believe I am dead.
Conclusions
1. With each day, I gain strength and mobility. With each day, I am more determined to settle accounts with the man who almost killed me. I believe I shall be ready to do so by the time you read this document.
2. Although I harbor murderous fantasies with respect to Jasper Morse and am plagued with nightmares and panic attacks, I believe I understand and perhaps even have compassion for him and his episodes of insanity. I am not clear that I can forgive him. I do know that even as I am the victim in this saga I am partly at fault for continuing to invite risk (and sexual satiation) in what is, face it, a hazardous occupation.
3. I have conceived a plan to bring Morse to account. It would employ soft power rather than brute force and it could conceivably squelch his plans to drill for oil and gas under Blackwood Forest.
Matters of Opinion
1. Although I swear to the truth of each fact I relate above, I realize that in a court of law Morse could assemble a legal team that would run roughshod over my testimony, especially since I was to have been paid for my services. In the eyes of the law I am a prostitute. Apart from Jacinta, there is no eye-witness before my splash into the ocean. Therefore, I am convinced that pursuing retribution through the police and the courts would be futile. Morse is an exceptionally wealthy man, far wealthier than I imagined before this incident. He is capable of bribing his way out of or forestalling anything I could muster.
2. Apparently there were media accounts that Morse was cleared of suspicion in my disappearance, despite what Jacinta (and presumably her mother) knew of my condition before I fell into the sea. Maybe they so feared repercussions and the loss of their jobs, that they remained silent. If I can find them and if they have not been bribed, I believe they can help me achieve closure to this story.
3. Once I have settled matters with Morse, I believe my future will be best served by becoming a legal resident of Statia. My full recovery will take a long time. This island and its giving people, would hasten the process. In return, if all works out with my plan, I believe I could return their kindness many fold.
4. That I was saved by a sentient species from a watery world was a spiritual experience with no equal. Though I have no conviction of a sky god in any shape or form, from here on I shall think of dolphins as spirit guides and I shall swim with them again.
5. My life for 29 years has always teetered on the brink, especially in the past eight when I have been an elite bisexual mistress with a black belt and a penchant for drugs and drama. When I went over the cliff and survived, I knew it was time to put that behind me, to try to build anew, and to turn my life toward better ends.
Action
To achieve these plans, I need help. The call that led you, Lara, to this testimony came from the only neighbor with a landline, a young woman named Camilla Postma. I trust you have understood her message. Camilla has been a rock for me.
PLEASE CONFIRM BY EMAIL AND CALL ME AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE AT 519-318-7745.
It is a tourism office. Calls to and from the USA will raise no red flags. Juanita Rivas in that office is a friend of the Baileys. She will arrange a cab for me. I will return your call within the hour. The office is open 8:30 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm. Statia is in the Atlantic time zone, one hour ahead of US Eastern Standard Time.
14
Lara sat stunned, rereading paragraphs of the testimony Abruptly, she wiped away tears of relief and shot back a one-line email confirmation. It was 11 am — noon in Saint Eustatius. Her head spinning, she bolted out of her lab and down the stairs to the benches outside McWhorter to call Juanita Rivas. For weeks, she had been convinced that Adrienne had perished; now elation about her ex-lover’s survival had been overtaken by a compulsion to help and maybe also to save Blackwood Forest in the eleventh hour.
Two hours later, her conversation with Adrienne having plumbed her depths, Lara realized she loved the woman after all. What would this portend for her and Jason? That she loved Adrienne — a fondness, an admiration, not romantic love surely, she reasoned — really had nothing to do with her and Jason. Or did it?
Lara found us at The Eclipse plotting our forthcoming showdown with President Redlaw. She burst upon the scene, greeting us and apologizing for the interruption. “I need to speak with Jason, Katherine, Hannah, Astrid, and Nick. Someplace away from here, right now. It will take just a few minutes. When they return, they will share a surprise that could totally upset the apple cart.”
She heard Astrid say, “Surprise? Huh, socio-ecological system sideswiped by emergent events. Anybody remember Thomas Homer-Dixon? No? Okay, forget it. Let’s get going.”
We followed Lara out the door. Dodging traffic, we hurried across Windham Street to Weary Hall. She asked us to sit in close formation on the front steps. She encapsulated the news of Adrienne, her request for help, and the urgency of the situation. Whoever first uttered the word “flabbergasted” must have been imagining our collective astonishment as we stared at Lara. Then, like a burst of fireworks, we rocketed a stream of questions at her.
“Look, look! Sorry,” she responded. “Neither you guys nor I have time to mull over details and contemplate options. Events have overtaken us. You must deal with Redlaw while I rush to gather items Adrienne needs for her mission. I caution you not to breathe a word of Adrienne’s resurrection to anyone outside the Group of Thirteen. Honestly, I have no idea how these developments will unreel separately or interact with one another. All I can ask is that you trust me and that we stay in close touch.”
Lara blinked. Almost to herself, she asked, “How in hell did a smart-assed Minnetonka girl raised by a dysfunctional parent ever end up pulling strings in an international thriller?”
“What is Adrienne’s timeline?” I asked.
“Adrienne has less than 72 hours to encounter and trap Morse in Saint Thomas.
“How can we help?” I asked.
Dazed, Lara looked at me as if she were encountering a stranger. “Well, H-H-Hannah,” she stuttered. “As for you guys, I simply ask that you try to buy some time with Redlaw and hold fast the secret of Adrienne’s survival.”
Katherine said, “Unless the administration intends to call in the National Guard, I think we can reasonably sustain the occupation for another, what? three days. They might actually prefer us to drag our feet. It seems clear they’re reluctant to confront Morse.”
Lara scanned our eyes and intuited concurrence. “Okay, good.” Lara saw us shaking our heads at the improbability of everything, unable to compute systemic outcomes. She asked, “Astrid, what do you have on Gruppo Crogiolo that I can take with me? I hate to call it blackmail but that’s what seems to be evolving here.”
Judging from her indifferent expression, Astrid seemed lost in a distant realm. With sleepy eyes, she studied her hands and fussed with her sleeves. I noted with alarm that she had failed to remove telltale signs of the blackening salve from her wrists. Her weary demeanor transmitted the stress of last night’s high-stakes adventure followed by almost no sleep.
Lara waited impatiently. Astrid refocused and spoke as if what she was about to reveal was nothing more than an afterthought. “Umm, yeah, I was about to tell everybody that my associates and I have successfully hacked into several of Mr. Morse’s accounts. And, um, we have moved sums from those accounts to others we set up in Saint Kitts, which is, quite interestingly I would say, just south of Saint Eustatius.”
Lara’s jaw dropped. She gulped. “What a breakthrough, Astrid! Can you supply details? Like, how much.”
“Yeah, I can do that.” Astrid responded so casually you’d think she had been asked to order pizza or find Latvia on a map. “Yeah, we’ve got incontrovertible evidence.” She pulled documents from her pack.
“So, here’s a copy of my assessment of Gruppo Crogiolo and the banks and particular accounts we nabbed after breaking through multiple firewalls. Obviously, I do not reveal either my methods or the Saint Kitts account details.” Astrid yawned. She pulled at her dreads, scratched her ear, suffered an involuntary twitch.
“The sum?” Lara reminded Astrid.
“Oh yeah, well, we thought it ought to be big enough to grab Morse’s attention. So, yeah, overall, it’s, like, about seven-point-five mill.”
“Whoa! Are we talking U.S. dollars?” asked Jason.
“The very ones.”
“Shite! That’s one gobsmacking numbah.”
“Yeah, I suppose it is,” Astrid said nonchalantly. She had more to confess. “You know, I’ve been wracking my brain on how to use this evidence to nail Morse without going to prison myself. I believe I now have my answer. Though I hardly knew her, I am thankful Adrienne is alive, of course. But I am on the verge of being giddy to learn that we are about to hang that evil dude by his testicles. Or whatever Adrienne has in mind.”
“Here, here,” said Jason.
“Let’s hear it for my Canadian compatriot!” Nick exclaimed. Astrid reached around to give a little tug to Nick’s beard and grinned shyly. Lara took hold of Astrid and gathered in the rest of us for a group hug of such emotional heft that even Nick found himself choking up.
15
Mitchell Redlaw descended the steps of the presidential residence, his briefcase in one hand, a container of freshly baked apple-walnut muffins in the other.xii He failed to notice the apricot orb in the east or the honking geese overhead or the swirls of falling maple leaves and the glow of yellow chrysanthemums in the low sun, or even the morning crispness signaling colder days to come. His head swam with worst case scenarios: a deplorable morass, he reckoned, likely a lose-lose outcome both for his administration and us. Last night, he checked our Occupy Centennial Facebook site to see another planned demo at Stiggins Hall.
His mood darkened with each step toward Brownlow Library and through the leafy courtyard between Brownlow and Stiggins with its sunken garden and modernist statue of Pan by Fletcher Emanuel Flocker, a professor of art in the early seventies and an avowed Pan worshiper. Flocker had reputedly been run out of town after being caught with his hand up the skirt of a former president’s wife at an alumni gala. Redlaw admitted to me that he always wondered why upright Argolis Christians had not then lobbied for removal of Flocker’s Pan, and before that, had not objected to its subtext: a statue of a god whose activities as a half-goat, half-man rambler of groves and fields, and companion of the nymphs were meant to boost fertility. On his way to work, each morning he took special pleasure in high-fiving Pan, at least in his imagination. Hello Pan, he would entreat. Bless all the randy fantasies of those who walk these hallowed grounds.
As Mitchell Redlaw left Pan this morning, he began to hear the steady beat of percussion and chants. His stomach roiled like an autumn cyclone. Today, he was convinced, was about to become one bodeful and tediously long test of his administration’s deluded picture of the troubled world.
16
The morning had seemed so full of promise. Mrs. Wickett, his ageless chef and presidential mansion supervisor, greeted him brightly an hour earlier with freshly baked muffins. Thelma Wicket was an institution at Gilligan: not just an indispensable employee, but also the revealer of the state of things as they really are rather than Redlaw’s intellectualized version of them. This morning, as she laid a copy of the Columbus Express on the table, she warned, “Mr. President, there’s Blackwood news here that may spoil your day. Before you read a word, think happy thoughts and savor a muffin with your coffee. I’ll send you across the street with a couple of dozen more muffins for the folks in Stiggins. I predict my muffins will help everyone put their day in proper perspective. “
“Thank you, Mrs. W. I promise that I shall not read the paper until fully fortified.”
“That’s a good fellow.” She laid out his breakfast and retreated to the kitchen.
When he had eaten, he turned his eyes to the newspaper. “¡Ay caramba!” he exclaimed out loud, though his first inclination was to say, “What in bloody hell!” But Mrs. Wickett brooked no cussing in this house. And she was, after all, the trail boss, having outlasted four presidents leading up to Redlaw, going back to 1974. And there was an increasingly good chance that Redlaw would be her fifth. He now understood her precaution. There were more than a dozen loose ends and decisions relating to the Blackwood protest and occupation. But this new development would surely take precedence. How could this situation become more dire?
In the Stiggins conference room, the President’s Executive Council meeting opened with news of the vandalism at Morse Valley Energy’s drill site.xiii
Media Relations Director Beth Samuels distributed photocopies of the front-page story in the Columbus Express. She said, “The plot obviously thickens with this development. However, I would caution us to respond to this vandalism as if it had nothing to do with our energy plan and the protest on campus. Until there is evidence to the contrary, I have advised President Redlaw to express regret and disgust at the unlawful acts and to offer full cooperation with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Bartholomew Sheriff’s Department. A press release will go out in the next few minutes. I will also say that, after consulting with Legal Affairs Director Hexam, for the time being, the president decided that Gilligan’s level of cooperation should not include searches without warrants nor detention of any of our students who, in their protest and occupation, have been lawfully exercising their rights.”
An uproar from both sides of the table prevented Beth from turning over the agenda to the president. Mrs. Wickett’s muffins were failing their mission.
“Mitch, I cannot believe you’re recommending we equivocate here,” Vice-President for Facilities Management, Harry Phillips, exclaimed with vehemence. “We need to clear these children off the quad, pull aside each of their leaders to ascertain their whereabouts last night. Enough of these sixties follies. Somebody’s going to get hurt here and every day our reputation sinks further and further into the mire they’ve created. Call in the National Guard if we have to. Another thing: those kids are wrecking the landscape. Centennial Quad looks like it’s been desertified and with the predicted rain it will soon be nothing but a muddy bog.”
Stephen Langston, the VP for Finance and Administration, looking dangerously close to cardiac arrest, shouted, “Mitch, Beth, Lottie! And whoever else may be harboring temperance here: Stop! Stop mollycoddling these adolescents! Face up to it, we have allowed ourselves to be blackmailed by them long enough. When you meet with them, Mitch, tell the buggers their gig is up. Let them rant and rave about Morse and Tulkinghorn all they want. The provost can take care of Tulkinghorn and the rest of us will assemble reasonable explanations to counter their naive allegations. Be done with all this. As Harry just said, get them off that Quad before it turns to mud. Tomorrow is the first of November. Next week is predicted to be stormy.”
Vice-President for Research Agatha Larkins jumped into the fray in support of the students. “Our students have become the envy of the post-carbon crowd and poster children for the national media. They have articulately responded to questions about their motivation. In their words, this is about their future as well as protecting a special place. Many faculty believe their case has not been taken seriously and that the political clout of the fossil fuel energy sector and the governor have steamrolled over our integrity as a university and the future of these students. I believe we missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be on the right side of history.”
Monique Barley, Dean of the Graduate School, added that she had heard overwhelming support of the occupation among the graduate faculty. “Sixty-something percent of the faculty in the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development, for example, rejected the university’s energy plan and therefore implicitly support the students’ case against drilling under Blackwood Forest.”
“Yes, yes!” argued Akira Robinson, the Director of Institutional Equity. “I am impressed with our students, and the points they’re making about green energy are totally valid. It is where we on this council should be. A quick shift away from fossil fuels will be to everybody’s benefit.”
“I could not disagree with these women more stridently,” interrupted Grace Battersby, Vice-President for University Advancement, who usually was as reticent as Clarence Thomas. Her stake in the argument was hardly nuanced and she saw no need to apologize. She launched a fevered offensive. “Agatha, Monique, and Akira, I find it shameful that you should ally with the occupiers. This occupation breaks the law. Furthermore, the occupiers have also likely committed felonies at the drill site. All of which besmears the good name of Gilligan University. To me, it makes absolutely no sense to vilify one of our wealthiest alumni with allegations that would require years to substantiate and would surely lead to very negative consequences for this campus.”
She paused briefly to examine her manicured fingernails flashing tangerine glitter. She solemnly folded her hands. She took a moment to fondle the Clé de Cartier watch on her wrist. After still further dead air, she looked up, pulled a pugnacious expression and continued her finger-wagging tone. “With his wealth, Mr. Morse also has the wherewithal and tenacity for a protracted legal battle that would drag on year after year. Can you imagine being in the eye of a negative PR storm that would gain strength with each of his appeals? Why would we want to do that? If the man is as wealthy as some in my office believe, we stand to benefit much more if we undercut their silly allegations about his affair with a prostitute and the whole Larnaca Chair thing. We need to provide him cover. And let me warn you: if we are on the wrong side of his ire, let alone history, the consequences for Gilligan are too awful to contemplate. It would be the antithesis of my mission here and …”
Vice-President Battersby’s argument was interrupted by a pandemonium of shouts and allegations, of verbal left hooks and counter punches, skin and hair flying, screams one on top of the other; a donnybrook such as none President Redlaw had witnessed in a twenty-six-year career in university administration. Curiously, Provost Helen Flintwinch had not weighed in. He wondered why. Yet how cutting and irrational the insinuations that frothed from the mouths of these alleged members of the cultured class. Wherefore their presumptive right to attack each other?
Redlaw realized no one could be blamed but himself. And yet, he remained calm and gazed upon the unholy turmoil as through a tower window. In time, he felt assured that this was his moment to reach back for truths he’d always known: truths that are simple and straightforward; truths needing little elaboration or academic circumlocution; truths naked and raw, sinew and bone, irreducibly and fully his own.
Above the cacophony, Mitchell Horvath Redlaw rose from his seat to assume his full power forward stature, ascending now above the fray, as if he had become a ridiculously open man on a court full of midgets. He fixed his glare upon each member at the table, one-by-one, all ten of them. They hushed. Unruly children caught by their headmaster in multiple tantrums. After long moments when the air became still as a mid-August day, when even the motes of dust and pollen had suspended their circuits, the president spoke.
“My colleagues, I would argue that we have not been held hostage by these young crusaders. If we are hostages, we are so because of our own intransigence and lack of imagination. I am to blame more than any of you and I take full responsibility. When we as a university might have staked out high ground, when we might have boldly modeled a quick transition to green energy, when we might have creatively leap-frogged over obstacles inherent in university and state budgeting — when we could have taken all these extraordinary steps, instead we made a Faustian pact with a wealthy alumnus who had backed us into a corner and who personifies the notion that humanity can burn fossil fuels ad infinitum without inducing climatic collapse. We, of all of society’s institutions, we should have listened to our environmental scientists who know full well that the current mindless expansion of fossil fuel production, driven by hydraulic fracturing, is hardly a bridge to a zero-carbon campus and is neither ethically nor environmentally sound. Even within the frame of our plan, we will discover that the shale gas bridge to green energy will have collapsed as climate and civilization will be on the brink.”
Redlaw lapsed into a pause, staring toward unfathomably bleak horizons, his expression solemn. Realizing the embarrassing lacuna, he quickly swept his eyes around the table and reverted to his notes in deeper, more hushed and humble tones.
“I stand here with a heavy heart and a shattered conscience. As your president, I have delayed and dodged and prevaricated, and stretched the truth about green energy directly leading to higher tuition, among other things, all the while hoping that this nettlesome occupation would lose steam and we could return to normal. That is not going to happen. As you witnessed this morning, if anything, the protest has gained strength across the student body and far beyond. This has become a talismanic event for these young people precisely because their campaign is fueled by the terrifying prospect that, if the fantasy of the fossil fuel era continues, they will have no reasonable future. Mr. Morse and his deeds, whatever they may be, his wealth and political connections; Dr. Tulkinghorn’s pathetic ploy to be a puppet master, if that’s what it was; the vandalism at Blackwood; and the regrettable furor of these past moments — all these things are merely specks on the clouded horizon that this generation of students perceives all too clearly. If we were to continue to cast our lots with Morse and what he represents, I have come to the conclusion that the students have every reason to bring us down.”
Redlaw briefly glanced at Beth Samuels, sitting next to him. She presented a despairing picture. She had spent more time with him in recent years than anyone at this table. They had become each an element in the other’s lives and had spun up a fine friendship with memorable laughs and wildly successful fund raising.
As for Beth, she believed she had learned to read Mitchell Redlaw unerringly. As he proceeded in this, what? mea culpa?, she realized how terribly wrong she had been. No way had she seen this coming. She was unable to imagine how to paste gloss on the turds he had just dropped. How regrettable! But perhaps her regrets were more about herself, corrupted as she had become by the vast underbelly of public relations.
The president continued. “Therefore what I propose is this: 1) we allow the students three days to wind down their occupation; 2) we notify the Ohio Attorney General that we have information leading us to believe that Jasper Morse is involved in tax evasion and possible fraud with respect to the Larnaca Chair; 3) we request that the Ohio Attorney General seek a court-ordered injunction on drilling under Blackwood; 4) we turn back the Larnaca gift and begin an investigation of how and why an obscure financial services company in Larnaca, Cyprus came to offer Gilligan University of Ohio a no-strings gift of twelve million dollars; 5) we suspend Dr. Truman Tulkinghorn until this investigation is completed; 6) Gilligan University of Ohio shall immediately revise its energy plan to move toward renewable energy with great urgency and without undue tuition increases; 7) in the meantime, beginning next fiscal year, we shall commit to purchase as much green energy as possible to reduce our fossil fuel portfolio and carbon load. Finally, I propose to announce to the students this afternoon that within a few days, ideally by late Monday, November 4th, we shall make a series of announcements that will greatly please them. That concludes my remarks.” The president calmly returned to his chair.
When many hands shot into the air, he called on the provost.
“Sir,” Helen Flintwinch began, her mouth turned down in an expression of disgruntlement, or was it disappointment or distemper? “With due respect, I believe that what you propose is a suicidal set of actions for this administration and likely for Gilligan in the longer term as we go forth rudderless and weakened.” Beneath the provost’s apparent heartlessness, Redlaw could sense hints of hesitation and guilt and perhaps even sympathy for his come-to-Jesus moment.
And in fact she continued more kindly. “We have had many good years together, Mitch, you and I. And I have mostly admired your wisdom and even keel as an academic leader. Therefore, I am astounded that you would so cavalierly and so unwisely go over to the enemy, these ruffians on the quad, not to mention pay so little heed to what I believe is the majority opinion here. I mean, how far do you intend to push this, Mitch?”
“As far as is necessary,” he replied.
“Well, I obviously do not see the situation the way you do. And so, regrettably, I want no part of your imprudence.”
Redlaw had no response.
After several other voices had been heard, or not heard, the selfsame voices that had droned-on aggravatingly over the past seven years, voices that today added nothing to Mitchell Redlaw’s conception of the future nor budged his resolve, and when the phantom had written mene, mene, tekel upharsin — impending disaster — just above the head of Vice-President Battersby, the president excused himself. He walked the long hallway toward his office. Beth, who had no vote, bereft and alone, followed him out the door and without a word turned away to a future she realized would be somewhere else.
As he entered the presidential suite, a work-study coed at the front desk greeted him with a bright smile, “How’s it going today President Redlaw?”
“Hi Brittany. Never better.” And for once, he meant it.
17
When Helen Flintwinch entered his office, she found him gathering personal items from his desk, stuffing them into his briefcase and a cardboard box: papers; his rolodex; a Gilligan coffee mug; his laptop; a plaque honoring 2006, his banner fund-raising year; his bottle of Irish whiskey; a few books, including, she noted, Burt Zielinski’s Climate Nightmares.
“Mitch, the vote was lopsided: only three in your favor. Rules tell us to convey this to the Board as a vote of no confidence. That is, unless you’ve changed your mind.”
He straightened up and walked to the window, his back to Flintwinch. He could hear the chimes on Stiggins striking one o’clock. He did not expect to be evicted so soon in the day. He turned back to the provost. “My impassioned reasoning did not move the needle much, did it? But that’s not what matters to me and I surely have not changed my mind. Further, you can tell your esteemed colleagues that I am hereby submitting my resignation.”
He returned to his desk, plucked a single sheet of letterhead with a one-line statement, his bold signature at the bottom. He handed it to the provost.
“You’re a fool, Mitch.”
The president smiled, true to his soul, this moment. “You could be right, Helen. But my vindication, I believe, will descend upon us, possibly soon, and then Winthrop, Morse, Larnaca, and Tulkinghorn will all have become moot. If we live to tell the story, we shall long regret what we have wrought.”
“Poppycock,” she declared, matching his antique cliché with an equally decrepit expression. She began to sidle away. Before she left the room, she turned around and spoke more tenderly, “After all this is behind us, Mitch, and you’ve landed another opportunity, I hope we can get together over an Irish coffee.”
Although Redlaw’s anguish had weakened him and his whole body had quivered in the rush of events, at that suggestion, a wave of rage coursed through him. He looked across his office toward the provost standing pathetically in the doorway. “Don’t hold your breath, Helen,” he said.
She departed wordlessly.
He gathered the last of his possessions and his briefcase and walked to the outer office. His executive assistant was speaking. “We are so sorry, President Redlaw. This is not how we imagined this day to be. Everything seems so, so unfair and tragic. We all shall miss you, terribly.”
Redlaw nodded. He put on a wan smile. He placed his box and briefcase on the floor. He went around to hug each of his staff ending with Brittany, now blubbering, perhaps deeply forsaken for the first time in her life. He was moved by her tears and tried to come up with a profound farewell. All he could muster was, “I hope we shall meet in times to come.”
He walked into the hallway and out the back door.
18
Outside The Jenny, Astrid declined a lunch offer.
“Astrid!” José, hyperkinetically shuffling, protested. “You avoiding me now that you’re some kinda millionairess off to celebrate with those hacker geeks in virtual space?”
“José, shut up. Nobody breathes a word of that. I do have some kind of intellectual life, you know.”
She hated to be so brash, for she had come to enjoy palling around with José, but the situation with the child was becoming urgent. She ran down Harrison Hill to Eastman Quad and climbed the stairs of Morgan Hall to her room. She opened the door and came upon a scene of utter chaos, her bed, chair, and desk covered with all manner of detritus: dirty laundry, text books, weeks-old copies of The Press, an orange Gilligan Frisbee, a tangle of wiring, headsets, earbuds, recharging devices. She had no time to straighten the mess, made worse by her almost total absence in the past week. As the world goes over the cliff who will ever remember that Astrid had not tidied her room? That was the question.
She pulled her laptop from her backpack, fired it up, went deep into its register to build firewalls around her search. She rapidly typed: missing child bartholomew county ohio.
~
Katherine ran from The Jenny to her apartment. She opened the door and paused to listen. Everything was still. She bolted up the stairs. Carrie, her downstairs neighbor, a student at Southeast Tech, sat watching an episode of Being Human on her tablet. Macy, at her side, was curled up on the couch, sound asleep, her head on Carrie’s lap.
“Hi Carrie,” Katherine whispered, trying to regain her breath and sound normal. “Has all been well?”
“You bet. This is one curious, lively, hungry little being. Long as I kept feeding her cheerios and toast and let her toddle around exploring everything, she was a plenty happy girl. Easiest baby-sitting ever.”
“Well, that’s a big relief. I can take over from here for a couple of hours. Can you still return later?”
“No problem. Today’s my day without classes. What time?”
“Say, three-thirty?”
“I’ll be here,” Carrie gingerly placed Macy’s head on a pillow and loped down the stairs with a good-bye. Katherine glanced across at the serene little being, recalling somehow the first line of a Bronte poem, a poem her dad recited to her years ago: Come hither child — who gifted thee? She wondered: Who did gift thee, Macy? And why?
Hearing the door close, Katherine reverted to her predicament. She picked up her phone and tapped-in Astrid’s number.
“Astrid? Katherine. Do you have news? … Uh huh, okay. Have the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts been contacted?”
“Oh, I see. A cabin? Uh huh. No sign of a Boy Scout?”
“What about the troop leaders?”
“Right. Quite unexpected.”
“Okay, so far, so good. Why don’t you come over for lunch? We can discuss the next troop meeting. I’ll fix a salad. Great. See you soon.”
“Sheesh,” Katherine fretted out loud.
Macy sat on the carpet scattering and shuffling and delivering and taking back pieces from Katherine’s Scrabble game. She wore Pampers and one of Katherine’s outsized t-shirts. Her pajamas were in the washing machine. Macy ill-clothed; Katherine’s larder bare as Mother Hubbard’s. Katherine had no need for the stress of a lost child.
She and Astrid sat at the kitchen table. A simple lunch of greens, goat cheese, and artisan bread. Though Astrid had dropped off Macy in the wee hours, this was the first time she had been at Katherine’s in daylight. She gazed at the pictures on the wall. “Are those scenes from Italy? Didn’t you live there?”
“Yes, they are and I did live there a couple of years,” Katherine replied. “I worked in Florence. Seems like decades ago. I’ve aged that much in the past ten days.”
“Yeah, girl, you’ve got the weight of this melodrama on your shoulders for sure, especially now that Lara’s off to the Caribbean. If there’s any way I can help, you know, just ask.”
“That’s sweet of you, Astrid. Let’s see how the rest of the day pans out.” Katherine turned pensive, a habit she wished she had not picked up from Stefan. After another moment, she asked, “And how are you weathering this high wire act of exposing a tycoon who could waste us all?”
“Well, I’m kind of used to living on the edge given my penchant for snooping. Yeah. So … as far as my intellectual life goes, I feel uneasily on hold. Before Blackwood, I had plenty of days when I was emotionally wonky, sometimes in a kind of surreal memorable poetic way, trying as I was to negotiate the snooty honors program while grappling with elevated levels of existential angst regarding the nature of knowledge, technology’s intrusion on my well-being. Like, I feel as if I’ve had some kind of implant in my brain, the prospect of omega, the sugar high of hacking. You know?”
“I do,” replied Katherine, though she took in only part of Astrid’s stream of consciousness.
Astrid shifted in her chair to the lotus position, her scuffed and filthy feet in full view of their salads. “Before all this Morse shit made me even crazier, I was writing an essay having to do with learning, geekdom, infogasm, paradox, the void, and such.”
Katherine looked into Astrid’s hazel eyes and two observations flashed across her mind: a) a woman so brilliant must quickly become bored with drones like me, and b) funny how I take her appearance for granted nowadays — her rainbow tam over long dreads, her piercings and henna imprints; the boho-chic pantaloons, loose-fitting top, bralessness and bangles; the bare feet. When I look into those eyes, I see this crazy smart, sensitive, venturesome woman, somehow all contained by that lily-white skin stretched over bird bones.
“Getting to Macy,” Katherine said, “let me repeat what I think you told me on the phone. First, there’s no missing child report in Bartholomew, right?”
“Right. I searched every which way and got nothing recent. Of course, there are a number of New Barnstable teens gone missing in the past couple of months. Off to the bright lights of the big city, I suppose. Pathetic if the city is Columbus.”
“Hmm, that is so strange. I mean it’s not like this little tyke dropped out of the sky.”
“For sure, unless you’ve heard Rahbi’s return of the mystical child.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. It’s way too weird — transcendence, releasing the lower three chakras, activating DNA, quantum healing, a child prophet, and such.”
Katherine’s mouth went limp, her brain overwhelmed by Astrid’s scrambled mess. She needed her to come back to Earth. “Otherwise, Astrid, you discovered something about a woman in a cabin.”
“Yeah, it was a hunter’s cabin. It may actually be on the edge of the Barstow property.”
“What a convergence. What about the woman?”
“She was around twenty. Dead.”
“Dead? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Buddha, Isis, and Krishna too. Look, the coroner estimated her to have died sometime yesterday, the day Macy found us. The woman had multiple tracks on her arms and the last needle she ever used hung from a vein on her left arm.”
“Heroin overdose?”
“Apparently.”
“Good God! Any evidence of a child having been there?”
“Well, yes. The owner of the cabin is a grandfather. He had not been there in a couple of weeks. He said that the kids’ games and belongings scattered about the cabin and dirty pampers in the trash were his grandchildren’s. He remembered that they did not pick up after themselves the last time they were there. So, if Macy’s mother was a fugitive hiding in that cabin a few days, Macy would naturally have gone to the kid’s things. There was nothing stolen and no indication of a second adult or a break-in.”
“And if that woman was not Macy’s mother,” Katherine cut in, “then why isn’t some other mom going crazy over her missing child?”
“Right. Somebody ought to be freaking out, unless that somebody is dead. By the way, straight-line, the lookout ledge where Macy wandered in, is only about a kilometer away from the cabin.
“Have the police identified the dead woman?”
“Yes, tentatively. A receipt from an urgent care clinic in Olean, NY issued to a Jessica Crabtree is all they found. It was in her windbreaker pocket. So, they’ve put out a missing person bulletin to surrounding states.”
“Anything turn up?”
“Not yet. But following a Canadian hunch, I searched for missing people in Ontario and came across this on the RCMP site.” She opened her laptop and turned it toward Katherine.
“RCMP?”
“Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They do stuff the FBI might do here. Interprovincial crimes, federal investigations, such like.”
“This seems like an interesting possibility, though this person is called Cynthia Shevchenko.”
“If she’s on the lam in the USA having kidnapped her child and is here without a passport, would you expect her to use her given name?”
“No. Hmm, she went missing from Sudbury with a child named Sofia last December … almost a year ago.” Katherine read on. “Oh dear! A runaway for a good reason. Alleged sexual abuse of the child by the father. I see. What do you suppose we ought to do? Should we tip off the Bartholomew Sheriff and tell them they’ve stupidly limited their search to the U.S.?”
“I’d say procrastinate because …”
“Oh, excuse me,” Katherine interrupted. She reached over to pick up her vibrating phone and went into her bedroom.
Astrid wandered to the living room and sat in lotus on the rug across from Macy who was trying to stack Scrabble letters.
“Macy girl, you happy?” she asked as she carefully added an “m” to the stack.
“May-zie gooh girl. May-zie wan cheery-ohs.”
“Uh huh. Be even happier with Cheerios, eh? Macy, what about mama?”
“Mama gon night-night.”
Katherine returned.
Astrid looked up quizzically.
“More emergence,” Katherine said, “Novel properties of this damned system that nobody could have predicted. They keep rolling in.”
“Oh crap,” Astrid called over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen to pour the last of the Cheerios into a coffee mug. She came back to the living room. Macy took a fistful. She said, “Eee-yum.”
“Should I be prepared to flee back to Canada?”
“Maybe farther.”
“What is it?”
“It was Redlaw on the phone,” Katherine replied, her uneasiness apparent. “Sounded like he was in a car. Bluetooth maybe. His voice was hollow and tentative somehow. No presidential timbre, you know?”
“What’d he say?”
“He said we should be prepared for a surprise but not to lose our resolve.”
19
Em placed her head on her folded hands on the oak table. She was impossibly sleepy in Brownlow Library. She could not force herself to focus on the pages she had been trying to read. She remembered nothing of them. She dozed off. Twelve minutes later, she quaked upward, rubbing her eyes, her neck stiff, fingers tingling. Dans l'enfer, où suis-je?. An incoming text.
She reached for the phone.
~
It was 7:00 PM in the Occupy village. The atmosphere was tense, brimming with confusion and rage. Menace in the air. Ambient adolescent fears of expulsion and armed police aggression fueled the apprehensions of the rebels, timid and bold. Insurrection hung heavy over the village, a shroud on their pretentions. Nick whistled, called for order, vainly fought to calm a hundred agitated greens. Many minutes passed before they were ready to obey. “No matter who’s president,” Nick cried out to them, “we must continue this resistance. And we must also meet our obligations as students. We have not been told to cease our protest. So, let’s keep up with our schoolwork, and be ready for new developments at a moment’s notice. Despite Redlaw’s departure, about which we know very little at this moment, we have the upper hand. Let’s not forget we have come a long way through non-violent civil disobedience.”
Nick paused and walked among the legions, a technique that had worked before. He found a stool and climbed upon it. At the top of his lungs, he shouted, “Blackwood shall not be desecrated, I promise you that. And GUO will never burn shale gas. We won’t leave this place until we achieve these goals. We shall never capitulate.”
Some cheered and chanted, “Nick! Nick! Nick!”
Watching him I began to think we would make it through another night.
“Nonviolence? Bull shit!” screamed a female voice in the darkness.
Oh no.
“What about trashing the drill site last night?” she asked. “Folks at a meeting a couple of weeks ago said they’d bring down the administration with violent revolt. Where’s that guy who had the monkeywrenching book? Is he one of us?”
Several in the crowd lent the woman their support, “Yeah, Nick, how can you call that stuff non-violent?”
“You can’t.” he shot back. “What happened at the drill site last night must mean that somebody else is pissed. It is unrelated to what we are trying to accomplish here.”
After many more questions and responses the group began to chill. They dispersed, slowly. Nick turned to Katherine, “Well, for now, we seemed to have quelled that little insurrection. What next?”
“It’s not capitulation,” she replied with a crooked smile.
“By the way, have you seen Zachary today?”
“No. Why?”
“Just wondering. If that dude engineered the vandalism at Blackwood, I’ll have his ass.”
“Non-violently?”
“Of course.”
Melissa weaved through the milling crowd toward Katherine. She smiled a silent greeting and led Katherine into the shadows at the edge of the village.
“Is everything okay?” Katherine asked nervously.
“You bet. The handover was effortless.”
“Oh, thank God! You are a life-saver. I’m not sure I could have coped another night.”
“Glad I was able to convince Boss to take Macy. He met me as planned. She didn’t even cry. She’s quite the trooper. When he drove off, she was engaged in deep conversation with the teddy bear I brought.”
“Will Boss and his woman look after her?”
“No. They don’t do children. His wife’s sister is close-by. She raised six children and for thirty years has been offering sanctuary to refugee women and children from Mexico and Central America on their way to Canada. Her place is a sort of modern-day Underground Railroad station.”
“Macy will have playmates.”
“Yeah, that will be good for her.”
“Well, we hope to have her situation clarified soon,” Katherine said, hoping against logic that Astrid might come up with a resolution for the child.
“Boss said to tell you not to worry, Katherine. Macy will be in good hands for as long as necessary. He ordered us to concentrate on Blackwood. He was pleased, almost gleeful, about the outcome of our expedition. He even flashed a gap-toothed smile.”
“At a meeting on the quad just now, some of the occupiers slammed the monkeywrenching. ‘Aren’t we for non-violence?’ they screamed. Nick told them he didn’t know anything about the monkeywrenching.”
“It was a high risk operation,” Melissa admitted. “But we may have slowed things down just enough. That is, if you guys can convince the administration to confront Morse.”
“I believe events are trending our way.” Katherine said with confidence. But at heart she had no assurance that what she had just predicted had any basis in reality. She felt a trickle of sweat making its way between her breasts. Another little panic attack. She willed it away.
20
I pulled out my journal from under the pillow. It was 1:00 AM. The village had finally quieted. Nick was at Hanigan’s; Samantha and Frank fast asleep. The atmosphere had been electric all night. Occupiers roved from tent to tent buzzing around like hornets. Under the food tent a red-hot debate waxed and waned for hours. Students from all over campus crisscrossed the quad picking the brains of the occupying force and inflating tensions. Around the edges, campus police appeared to be on high alert, patrolling the streets that defined the quad, their cruisers more evident than any previous night. Rumor had it that they had arrested a gaggle of males, allegedly students from Kent State.
As was my practice, I needed to record everything that happened on this the seventh day of the occupation.
OCTOBER 31. Holy fuck, did that shower this morning at Alpha P. ever do wonders!!! No more carping from Samantha about my poor feminine hygiene and how badly I smell. All in fun, ok. She smells worse'n I do and so far, refuses to shower. Gross. Gussied up myself with outfit borrowed from that annoying twit Ashley. Hate her whining. Had to beg. My clothes all dirty. Besides, I own nothing stylish enough for my mission. Have to admit Ash has great taste and is my size. Her push-up bra did its best to give me a wee cleavage. Wahoo! (Time to put away the training bras, Mom … ) Who knew? Left top buttons on frilly blouse unbuttoned, pulled up black mini-skirt (barely covering bikini panties … my ass) Urp, half dressed. Questions: Have I graduated from prude to slut? Is this a promotion? Proceeded to office to entice Dr. T. into more intimate conversation. Whoever assigned me this job? Unless you’re a child porno freak, you wouldn’t be interested in my body. Whoa! Maybe he’s obsessed with nubile skinny teens. There’s that nightmare again. Puke explosion.
Dr. T. warmed up like never before. Maybe he was rock-hard over my teeny-tiny cleave. Is he a cleavage diver? He invited me to sit in his office. Drank coffee and shared a scone. How intimate! Greta flipped out when she saw my sexy top, mini-skirt, panty hose, and stilettos. She wanted full report afterwards. Went to Eclipse for debriefing. Think she’s learning things from me about Dr. T. and not all of them lovely. With Dr. T., I planted a few gems. Told him there’s dissention in the ranks (partly true) and we think all the rumors about the Larnaca Chair are false. That it’s a big feather in cap of CNRD and wouldn’t he be the perfect person to be honored with a Chair? Also, said we have little hope at stopping Morse. This seemed to set off his jollies, or was it my feminine charms? Did I know anything about the vandalism in Bartholomew? He wanted to know that. Me? No way. Is Bartholomew the place where the forest is located? What about Morse’s whereabouts? How could we clueless students ever be able to GPS that man with all his wealth and connections? He let something significant out at that point. What was it? Oh yeah: Even the best of us cannot corner that rich bastard joined at the hip with Winthrop. Tried to get in touch with him last week, Dr. T. said. He was hiding from me. Quote-unquote. Big slips maybe. Who is Winthrop? I forget. Funny thing: After that, Dr. T. apologized for using the bastard word. What a kind grandfather! Saving my virgin ears from defilement. (Is there such a word?)
Last thing, dear diary fairy and conscience (you whore), is I am worried sick over Samantha — her blood on the fence. She thinks her DNA is in some kind of data base 'cause she was tested and registered as a bone marrow donor a few years ago along with other kids in her church youth group. The youth pastor’s wife had leukemia. She died. Fuck, what’s that have to do with anything? Shut up, ho. Back to my worries: if they find out where Samantha was last night, she’s gonna be in deep doodoo and the rest of us will be toast. Mixed metaphors … shit on toast. Prison sentences, rape in the showers … me, a felon. How could I ever explain this to Dad?