Chapter i.
I had to go to Cancún.
You may know something about Cancún, but what you know is the tourist resort, the business end of the Mayan Riviera, not the true Cancún but a fiction of concrete and steel hovering tenuously like a desert mirage above a swamp of mud and shit.
Little do you realize that Cancún, that nest of snakes, that benighted Las Vegas on the stinking Caribbean, however little it may be remembered, was briefly the site of one of the greatest metaphysical massacres in human history.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
*
I had to go to Cancún to find the rhinos.
*
I didn’t find the rhinos there, exactly. Well, not right away. But what unfolded there, on the floor of the plenary hall – a global summit convened at the site where previous murders had taken place – (“The wife of an American reality TV show producer was found dead in the laundry room of the hotel Thursday morning,” a Mexican police spokesman told the press just a week before) – appeared for all the world as nothing more than diplomatic pabulum, but once I was in its midst I could see it for what it was: a fierce battle for control of the earth’s last territories: the forests, the waters, the carboniferous subterranean depths, the vast and depthless sky itself. The very holes where long ago the gods crawled to shield themselves from the light of modernity; the ether and enveloping light that illuminates all things sacrosanct and sacred; from the pits where devils dwell to the very nose of G-D: “Everything, but everything,” they said, “must go.”
*
How, you may ask, did I, Irving Maxim Malloy, come to know that Cancún held the key to the rhinos’ vanishing? I’ll tell you.
The man now known to you as Natasha’s dadda was once, in a past life, a star reporter, correspondent, and publisher-in-chief, for a little known but highly regarded investigative journal called the Ambergris Island Barb.
This was back when Ophelia and I’d lived there, on Ambergris Island, near Nantucket on the other coast. It was the 1970’s and we were what they called back-to-the-landers. Naïve, we were, but happy. I’d built us a cabin of driftwood on the leeward side of the island….
*
…the days seemed endless, sifting through the brackish pools for curious jetsam and canoeing among the rushes with my binocs and my Golden Retriever, Jeb, spying on the mallards and the kittiwakes and the cormorants. Something by Elton John or Three-Dog-Night was always on the radio – “Jeremiah was a bulldog, uh uh uh!” … You could swim in the tidal basin, collect wild blackberries that edged the dusty roads in late summer, trawl for crayfish among the rocks.
When I wasn’t fingering through the beach glass for scrimshaw or shoring up the timbers on our raft-like domicile, I was reporting for the Barb. Truth is, much as I loved just laying in the warm mud with my music and my binoculars, I was never happier than when I was raking up muck and digging up dirt: I became a minor league hero by scuttling a liquid natural gas pipeline here, upturning an illegal waste dump there. When the Ambergris city council refused to allow transsexuals to run for local office, I broke a scandal involving the Police Chief’s grandmother that set the Mayor’s teeth on edge. The series of articles I wrote dispelling the fake, ugly rumors of a Muslim power grab on the Island eventually drove the city council, now run by a prominent drag queen, to give the whole Island a month off for Ramadan.
I enjoyed it. You could say it was a calling: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
But, as the saying goes, many are called but few are chosen, and my ascendancy in the adrenaline-fueled arena of shock-jock journalism ended sometime in the early 1990s when the Internet appeared. Goddamn Al Gore and his whole hypertrophied generation! See, from where I sit, the damned internet not only appeared, out of whole cloth, as if DARPA and the CIA and the NSA and all of them’d been building it in florescent Fairfax County basements since the moment Eisenhower made his “military-industrial complex” speech, but Appeared, like an apparition. Or an aparatchik. Appeared like the ancient Greeks inventing alphabetic language and severing human communion with all things Natural, to rob us first of our primal animal culture and then of our primordial role among the Holy Beings, and, finally, of our secrets.
What use is reporting if there’s nothing covered up, nothing to expose, and nothing any longer at stake – everything under the sun just a click away, click away, click away? And yet all of it encoded… disguised… camouflaged in plain sight, to the point of….static. There were simply too many real facts and alternative facts and known unknowns and unknown unknowns – too much information, not enough truth – just gimme some truth, John Lennon said – and no amount of investigation, contact tracing or data analysis could help.
When I gave up reporting Ophelia, my wife, went into democratic party politics, and before I knew it we’d moved West where the pastures of politics – so it seemed then – were greener than a Humboldt County Hemp Fair. Ophelia launched her career as a municipal magistrate, and I grew weed in the neighboring National Forest for about, oh, two decades, and wrote children’s books, like this one, more or less. Believing that the conspiracies of the post Watergate years had been fully fleshed out under the hot florescence of the InterWeb, I pretty much turned on, tuned out and dropped off.
*
I didn’t suspect, for all those years, that the conspiracies would continue mounting like bodies at Buchenwald. But mount they did.
And now there is a new secret, one that has haunted me since that moment at the zoo:
“Where’s the rhino?” I asked the zookeeper, incredulously.
The news upended a void.
“It, seems, uh, seems to have, well, disappeared.”
*
I once gave some credence to UFO’s, to the Chariots of the Gods, advanced aliens drawing the Nazca Lines and building the pyramid of Cheops – ancient mysteries somehow tied to more contemporary concerns like the government cover-up of Area 51, black-ops, chemtrails, fluoride in the drinking water to dull our cerebrums and erode our resistance … the sorts of things discussed on the rural remote radio shows of Art Bell. But as I matured, for the most part, for the most part, I’d somehow come to believe the world safe from secrets of such magnitude. These things weren’t true mysteries, I’d come to believe, merely fake news. But by dismissing any and all such conspiracies as fake news, I threw out the baby of truly majestic Mystery with the bathwater of bonafide bad ideas.
It turned out in my two-dimensional thinking I’d drastically over-simplified things. The intervening decades, it turned out, were neck-deep in muck, and as much as the InterWeb appeared to contain it all, not a hundredth part of the filth of government and industry is exposed there.
Thus, the calling of the journalist was, and is, not dead. Not at all.
*
So: where have all the rhinos gone?
The question plagued me, and it was that question that got me to open my rolodex and call up my old shipmate, Queequeg.
Queequeg Caliban’son.
If anyone could put me in touch with the right people to get on the trail of the rhinos, Queequeg could.
*
Old Queequeg was a friend from Ambergris who used to hang around the office of the Barb. He’d just shown up one day, a large yellowish purple man in a waist coat and a beaver hat and a face plastered with a checkerboard of red and black squares tattooed across his extraordinary features. He strode to my desk and doffed his hat to reveal a bald head with nothing but a small scalp knot of hair twisted up on his forehead, and he held up the latest edition of the Barb and said, in a rising baritone, “You wrote this?”
We’d been running a series on the end of the whale-oil boom, showing how the bust of the whaling economy in the 19th century had led to a period of peace on the island as labor shifted toward the Western frontier.
“Yes,” I’d said. “If you’d like to express your opinion on the content of the paper, I would urge you to submit a letter to the ed–”
“It’s good,” he said, cutting me off.
I couldn’t have been more surprised when he said he liked our coverage, though he had some amendments to offer.
“It didn’t occur to you to seek the whale’s perspective?,” he asked, and I’d just shrugged.
*
Queequeg never wrote a word for the paper, but he played what the anthropologists call a key informant role, hanging around the office shedding insights and challenging our data and calling out our analysis. “What does the river say?” he would ask? “Have you considered tapping the voice of the ancestors to lend some color?” He had a bone through his nose, and carried a broken harpoon that he’d near stabbed me with a hundred times if it was once, and was tattooed from head to toe with scrimshaw etchings, and those checkerboard squares he wore across his face. Because he showed up so often in those days we set him up at his own desk with a little brass plaque that said Editor Aboriginal.
He was the real thing, there was no doubt about that. But for all my whiteness, Queequeg called me friend, and when it came time to answer the rhino question, Queequeg’s was the first number I called.
*
With the gone rhinos plaguing me, I dialed Queequeg and asked if he knew anything.
“Come to Cancún,” Queequeg said.
“Cancún? Mexico? Like, the resort?”
“The last resort,” he’d said, in his cryptic Indian way. “Cancún is the site of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
“Climate change?” I’d said stupidly. “What has that got to do with rhinos? We don’t even know for sure if climate change is real.”
Click.
I waited a few minutes, and then rang Queequeg back. When he picked up, he said, “Believe me. Cancún, 2010. It’ll be bloodier than Waterloo. Hairier than Hastings. Grittier than Gallipoli. More awful than Appomattox. Badder than Bull Run. Messier than the Maginot line. Ickier than Iwo Jima. Stickier than Stalingrad. More fucked up than Fallujah.”
“Worse than Wounded Knee?” I asked, trying to be clever.
Click.
*
As it turned out, Queequeg had left Ambergris for the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, got there just in time to watch the American Indian Movement blasted to hell and Leonard Peltier carted off to a permanent address at Leavenworth. He fled the country for El Salvador, where he fought the rebels on the side of the poet Roqué Dalton. When Roqué was killed by his comrades, he jumped the border and joined Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He claimed he’d spent the ‘eighties in the mountains of Nicaragua running a rebel radio station where he’d gotten to know Giaconda Belli and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Joan Didion and Susan Sontag as they passed through, one by one. In the ‘nineties, after Uncle Sam had successfully pulled the plug on the Central American revolutions, he’d found his way back to Indian Country – that’s what they called it back then, by which they meant anywhere Indians lived – and played the main character in a film version of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. But the project ended up in post-production hell (something about the tribe suing the film company for copyright infringement, or vice versa). He was hired as a researcher for the PBS version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and it was with the proceeds from that that he’d had helped found a Rolling Thunder Revue to advocate for Indian rights and generally raise some Red Cloud Crazy Horse Cain. First he’d called his gang The Group of Unsettled Native Savages (GUNS), but was denied consultative status at the United Nations, so he changed the name. By the time I’d tracked him down, it was a well-established vehicle that went by the name The Organ for the Rights of Unsettled Indian Nations – TO RUINs.
*
I dialed back and Queequeg picked up before the first ring.
“But, Queequeg,” I begged. “The United Nations? Cancún? A conference? How can this possibly solve the problem of the rhinos?”
“Solve? No one said solve,” he said half solemnly and half mockingly. “At this point, there’s no solving anything. There never has been. This is about damage control, my friend.”
“Okay, fine. But still….I don’t understand.”
“Listen, Irving,” Queequeg said. “You have to trust me.”
*
Suddenly I had some decisions to make.
On that phone call, Queequeg invited me to come to Cancún to work for TO RUINs. What exactly I was to do, he would explain upon my arrival.
*
I called Ophelia, but my call went to voicemail: “I’ll be in council meetings until further notice, please leave a message. If you’d like to make a donation –” I tapped my toes and waited and left a message.
As for Natasha…this was going to be difficult. With Ophelia away my only choice was to leave Natasha with my sister Iphegenia in the outer Sunset District of the city. Ophelia couldn’t stand my sister, and Natasha wasn’t too fond of her either. But she was better than Ophelia’s sisters, and, well, there was no choice.
I went to her bedroom, where she was playing chase with her stuffed feline thing, Jag-Jag.
“Natasha, honey,” I began
She didn’t look away from her play, but nonchalantly said, “Dadda, you’re going…where?”
“How did you…? Nevermind. Yes, honey, I’m afraid duty calls. I’m going to have to go away for a little while.”
“Dadda, its written all over your body language. But, like I said, where?”
“Um, Cancún, Mexico. I’m going to meet up with my old friend Queequeg there at a, at a conference.”
“The United Nations thing? About climate change and stuff?”
I don’t ask anymore how it is that my five-year-old is so tuned in to global events. “Yes, honey, the United Nations thing, about climate change and stuff.”
“And you can’t bring me.”
“No, honey, I can’t bring you.”
“And you’re going to leave me with your sister Iphegenia.”
“Yes, honey, I think I have to leave you with Iphegenia.”
Natasha was silent a long moment, cantering her Jag-Jag across the blue plush carpet.
“Mom’s gonna kill you.”
“Mmmm, yes, I’m sure she is,” I said. “But…”
“But you have no choice. I know. And I understand.”
“You do?”
“I do,” Natasha said, finally looking up at me. “But I grant you your liberty on one condition.”
Well. This was new.
“What’s that, sweetie?”
“The condition is that you don’t treat me like a sad little girl that you’ve left at home with your, um, boring sister, and feel all guilty and worried and whatever it is dads feel when you go off on adventures, and…”
“Natasha, this isn’t an adventure,” I insisted. “This is my work.”
“Yes father,” she said. “Everyone goes to work in Cancún when someone named Queequeg who they haven’t seen for like a hundred years calls them out of the blue with some cryptic whatevers.”
“Natasha, sweetie, please…”
“Anyway, I wasn’t finished. The condition is that you don’t treat me like a sad little girl that you’ve left at home…But treat me instead like home base. Like, you, know, I’ve got your back, dadda, and I’ll be ready to come to the rescue should things get sticky.”
I was at a loss for words, so I just nodded. “Ok, honey. You are my home-base.”
She picked up the stuffed jaguar and plunged her hand into a hole under the creature’s neck, and pulled out a cell phone that her mother had gotten for her. I thought she was way too young to have her own phone, but Ophelia was more, well, pragmatic with that sort of thing.
Holding the phone up, Natasha said, “And one more thing.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“You have to swear on Jag-Jag’s spots that you’ll pick up the phone when I call.”
*
And so, with history and destiny awaiting me, I dashed off a note to Ophelia, in the style of Rudyard Kipling:
Dearest Ophelia:
I burn like trees in the Amazon
Melt like a plant in Japan
Like Captain Morgan and Sir Walter Raleigh did
I’m packing my bags and making my bid
Why? Because I can.
Weekly from old San Francisco
Great ships sail brash and bold
Go rolling down the ocean blue
Just like the pirates used to do
Rolling on like the ships of old
I’ve never courted a jaguar
Nor spent a uranium rod
In the afterglow of its fueling tower
Invisible as a god
I’ve never yet sailed on a sea of milk
Nor basked in a mescal sun
In a hammock woven of Swedish silk
Like a bandit on the run
So off I go to Mexico
Those wonders to behold
Roll down, roll down to Mexico
Roll really down to Mexico
Before I grow too old…
But I’ll be back to hold you
As sure as time is time
From across the world
To find my girls
With my reason and my rhyme
*
Ophelia was used to notes like this from me. She might not forgive me, but she’d understand.
On second thought, she’d neither understand nor forgive me. But well…for now I’m off to Mexico, rolling down to Mexico, before I grow too old…
II
At the airport in Cancún Queequeg met me with a great bear hug. He was older, and a little weightier, his tattooed head adorned with long braided hair gone silver. I don’t know how he could have more tattoos, but he did, crisscrossing his tanned copper skin like spiderwebs. Under his arm he carried a white buckskin briefcase with horsehair tassles. I was glad to see him.
As we walked out of the terminal, the unvanquished Toltec sun stabbed at my eyes and I winced.
“You’ll get used to it, old man,” Queequeg said, laughing. “We’ll get you one of them giant sombreros and some big mirrored narco sunglasses and you’ll fit right in.”
He spoke as slowly and deliberately as ever, and it was clear from his ribbing that my coming meant a lot to him. You don’t always know with Indians, they don’t let on if they like you or not. But Queequeg was clearly relieved to have me here.
“So, what do you need?” I asked, getting down to business.
“You know Irving, you got a good heart, right?”
“You mean, am I healthy?”
“Healthy? Naw, that’s not what I mean. Ain’t one of us healthy, old man. I got diabetes so bad I piss maple syrup. I mean, you still got your heart in the right place?”
“I came here, didn’t I?” I said.
“I guess you did,” Queequeg said. “So, listen up. Us Indians, we been at this human rights game for a while now,” he said. “Like five hundred and eighteen years. But most of us never liked writin’ the damn press releases. They’re too much like treaties or something, in’it?”
“So, you want me to write your press releases?”
“We’re people of talkin’, not people of writin’,” he said.
“I came all the way to Cancún to write a bunch of press releases?” I said.
“Now, Irving, cool down a minute. You know there’s a lot more to it than that. If you care about finding the rhinos – and believe me, the rhinos are tangled up somewhere in this whole shenanigan – then you’re gonna have to read between the lines. And to read between the lines, you gotta write between the lines. You with us or you not with us?”
“So, hold on a minute Queequeg? The way to find the rhinos is to write a bunch of press releases? I’m going to be your volunteer secretary and the rhinos are going to, what, leap out from between the…?”
He smiled big and stopped walking.
“Secretary,” he said. “I like the sound of that. Nothing voluntary about it though. It’s solidarity. That makes it, what would you say, involuntary, in’it?”
I gave Queequeg a long look.
“Irving, Irving, Irving,” Queequeg said behind me. “Listen, it’s not like that. You still can’t take a joke can you? Gimme a chance… lemme paint you a picture.”
“Okay,” I said. “One chance, Queequeg. No jokes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Injun promise, no jokes.”
“So?”
“Listen, who are the people been warnin’ the world about desecratin’ the environment for five hunerd years?”
“That would be your people.”
“Right answer. And who are the people who been seein’ their lands and waters and customs and cultures stole out from under ‘em and poisoned and polluted and sacked and wrecked and ruined and robbed meanwhile the whole planet goes to shit?”
“Your people,” I said.
“And who been tryin’ to live gently on the land all this time, tryin’ to keep the forests standin’ and the rivers runnin’ and the sun comin’ up in the mornin’ with our ceremonies and our prayers and ways?”
“Your people.”
“Okay. Now, who do you think is runnin’ this show down here? Who’s the big decision makers on climate change?
“I’ll take a guess,” I said. “Not your people.”
“You know who it is? It’s not only not our people. It’s the United Nations. Now, our people, we got no nation. We had nations. Great nations. We even had united nations. We had the great Haudenosaunee nation, the great Cherokee nation, the great Aztec nation, the great Inca nation. But this United Nations, Irving? It don’t include us.”
*
I flashed back to an investigation I’d done with Queequeg in the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in the 1980’s. We’d been up to our knees in sludge and trash when he told me he traced a quarter of his bloodline to Lenape people who’d called this island home for millennia and whose very bones were here beneath a century of cathode ray tubes and medical waste and chicken feet and cans of Spagettios. His other three-quarters were Wampanoag, Arawak and Irish – the first sent as slaves to the Caribbean after King Phillip’s War, the second native to the islands but forced to flee to maroon settlements in the mangrove swamps and coral cayes. And the third, slaves also, in the decades when the Irish did the work later forced on Africans. My own Irish bloodline, I’d told him, ran through the early sugarcane fields of Jamaica and Barbados before they were spirited away by Jewish pirates and wound up in Brooklyn.
Queequeg had lifted his head as he sorted through a heap of mangled children’s bicycles and rusted boilers and said, “You know Irving, I think we mighta met back then.” He grinned like the fox that ate the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and dove back into the trash.
*
Here in Cancún, trailing him through the airport parking lot twenty years later, I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’m here to help.”
“I’m not done,” Queequeg said. “And, I’m not trying to white guilt you into doing work you’re not prepared to do. I just need you on board, ok? So lemme tell you what this is about. You think one nation is bad?” he said. “Wait ‘til you see all the Nations of the world snarling like three-legged dogs over the last scraps of life we got left. Now that’s something to see, Irving. And they’re doin’ that over the dead bodies of our people, Irving. Over the silent snowy graves of our people.”
He quieted down a minute to let that sink in.
“So this is why we created our own vehicle,” he continued. “The Organ for the Rights of Unsettled Indian Nations – those nations who, precisely because we are not Nations in the U.N. sense, have no seat at the table. And we want you to be our secretary.”
*
I flashed back again: I was in some old grimy harbor, in pelting rain, wooden ships creaking and crashing in the salt sea air whipping from across a dark strait. It seemed to me I was there to sign up for a South Seas voyage, and I had just approached a ship called the Pequot when I was tackled and thrown to the ground by an oversized ogre – something like being trampled by a rhino, my face ground into the wet creosote of the pier. I lay there in a heap, giving myself up for dead, until I found I could open my eyes, and I did, and there before me stood this massive Samoan pulling a long puff from a tomahawk pipe and gazing down at me with utter solemnity, like a man who never cringed and never had a creditor.
“If ye want to live to fight another day – and to fight the divvil himself – you’d best not board this ship,” the stony looking savage said. For you be a man of writing, not a man of sailing, and you know it too. And as this ship is captained by a madman indentured to a banker and driving deep to Davy Jones to unflesh a holy phantom of a white whale, I warn you only once, this is an unholy mission and no place for the likes of you…”
I stayed put on the dock and watched as the doomed vessel hauled off into a shrieking, slanting storm….
*
The airport came back into focus, and Queequeg with it, talking, and I snapped back and said, “Queequeg, old friend, I’m honored to accept the mission,” I said. “It sounds truly righteous.”
“Truly righteous, shit!” Queequeg said. “It’s our fuckin’ nation and we can get as truly righteous as we wanna get. Lets start in a good way, Irving, and give you a truly righteous honorific. How ‘bout instead of secretary we call you ‘the scribe of the silenced?’ How you like that? Or ‘Stenographer for the Shut-out. Press Attaché for the Oppressed. News Desk for the Neglected, Editor for the Endangered. Your job is not only to write TO RUINs’ press bulletins. It’s to gadfly the powerful and interrogate the elite, to wake up the public. To change the story, Irving. To change the story.”
As he talked, Queequeg had flagged a cab and was putting my suitcase in the trunk. The heat was causing the Mexican asphalt to throb and quiver like black Jell-o.
*
“What makes you think I can write press bulletins any better than you can?” I asked him.
“Like I said, we’re people of talkin’, not people of writin’.”
“Plus,” he said, gesturing to his watch. “We got five centuries of complaining to do. We take it too personal, you know. Makes it hard to write a one-pager. You? You speak Spanish, you don’t talk too much, you don’t give a shit, no one knows who you are, and you been around Indians enough that you know how to read the smoke signals. We like that.”
Queequeg kept talking in the cab. He told me what Cancún was about, what this United Nations business was about, who was who and what was what.
“I don’t get it. Isn’t this just an environmental summit?”
“Environmental, sure. But you white guys, when you think of environment you think it means huggin’ trees and savin’ whales, and that’s where it ends. As it would happen, the word for environment in our language is the whole enchilada. Alpha to omega. Soup to nuts. One Living Universe – Multiverse, really, or Polyverse – in which it’s our role to maintain harmony in disharmony, to try to balance the dizzying vertigo we cause by shaking the world with our very steps, to heal the cracks and fissures with our songs and our makings the way the Holy Earth fills her cracks and fissures with turquoise, with emeralds, with opals. Our whole gig, to put it in plain English, is to be a diamond stud on the Ear of the Holy. I know you grock this Irving, I know you do, but can you confirm this for me? I mean, can we get straight on this from the get-go? I don’t wanna have to micro-manage you, you know. And I definitely don’t want to turn around and put you back on that plane after I gon’ and give you all them honorifics.”
I nodded. “I’m with you. Soup to nuts. Be a diamond stud on the Ear of the Holy. I never really thought of it like that but now that you say it –“
“And so what you got when you got the nations of the world and all their business elite throwin’ a jamboree on the environment, is you got a bargain basement warehouse for the whole enchilada, a fire sale for environmental products and services, the biggest shopping day of the year for All Things Great and Small: a little fresh water here, a little carbon there, sell you some pollution, trade you some genetic material, drop some green wool over your eyes, talk about the price of silver, the price of mercury, the price of a forest or a tree or even just what a tree does.”
“What do you mean, the price of what a tree does?”
“Okay, Irving, get this: you know the way a tree can breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen?”
“Sure. Photosynthesis.”
“Well, no that’s not exactly photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is when a tree takes sunlight and turns it into sugar. But I’m not bringing you on board to be a scientist, ok? Listen: the big bad chemical that’s causing the climate to change, it’s called carbon dioxide, right? And trees suck that up like vacuum cleaners. So, the ability of a tree to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that’s worth more than gold nowadays. And these cowboys at the United Nations, they just figured that out. We coulda told ‘em that five hundred years ago, but we been pretty careful about keeping some a these things to ourselves. So anyways, now they’re startin’ to think the world’s forests, the ones we got left, are like, a carwash for their toxic industry. You got a problem with pollution? Buy a forest.”
“For real?”
“Hell yes, for real, Irving,” Queequeg said. “Would you like that rainforest for here or to go? You want that in paper or in plastic?”
Queequeg burst out laughing and his whole frame shook. He looked at the driver and up at the enclosing roof of the cab and then rolled down the window and shouted “Paper or fuckin’ plastic!” into the Mexican streets.
I got it.
“Cash or credit?” I said in a subtle riposte. Queequeg looked at me and said, “Yeah, you got it Irving. That’s why we’re making you the Foreign Correspondent for the First Nations. Now, let’s get to work.”
*
As the cab banged over the rough streets, Queequeg whipped a laptop out of his buckskin briefcase and handed it to me. He wanted me to write a statement.
“No time to lose, Irving.” he said. “Gotta get those chops back.”
I took the laptop and opened it. Queequeg started talking and I started typing –
taking dictation, and watching the words grow on screen until they became a mean little press bulletin. When I was finished, I read it back:
“For Immediate Release, December 2010. Statement from the Organ for the Rights of Unsettled Indian Nations.
Cancún, Mexico – As representatives of the peoples and communities suffering the grossest impacts of climate change, we express our outrage and disgust at the very nature of the United Nationalists and their “talks” in Cancún.
“Nice start Irving,” Queequeg said.
I read on: “We can expect this conference to be dominated by corporate mafia Imperialists waging a diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery targeting those nations and those peoples whose future hangs most in the balance.”
“Excellent,” Queequeg said.
It finished with a flourish: “We will not be bought,” I said dramatically. “Nor will we be sold.”
“Bravo, Irving, Bravo. That’s pretty good,” Queequeg said. “You’re hired.”
I was proud that I’d impressed Queequeg, though we both knew it was all his words. I was on board – at this point how could I turn back? – but I harbored some doubts. I could understand big business buying everything up. But how was the United Nations, responsible for the vanishing rhinos? It made no sense.
*
We pulled up to a Holiday Inn and paid the cab and went in, and Queequeg said, “Hey, before we get to work, we gotta do a ceremony. Follow me.”
I should’ve expected it, but I didn’t. I followed him through a heavy steel door that said “Pool,” and down some stairs and then through a sliding glass door into a cavernous blue tiled room with an Olympic sized swimming pool. In a ring that encircled the pool, men stood, brown and gold and copper-skinned and dark-eyed and solemn, of all the peoples that first rose out of the earth of our America. They wore nothing but swimsuits. At the deep end, almost under the diving board, stood an old woman, squat and wide and with long gray braids tied with blue and yellow ribbon, with creased lines in her face and a nose sharp as an obsidian blade. She wore a radiant huipil cascading with flowers and birds and fruits in all shades of crimson and violet and lavender and green and she held a terra cotta bowl in one hand containing a flickering smoking ember that blinked like an orange eye. In the other hand, she held an eagle feather and a sage bundle.
She held the sage to the ember until it smoked and caught fire, and as she did she chanted in an unfamiliar language. To her left and her right, the men bowed their heads and listened. Queequeg gestured me to join the circle, so I did, and bowed my head. When her sage bundle was consistently smoking, the old woman began to walk the circle, approaching each man and waving her holy fire over him. Each one cupped his hands and captured a bluish waft of smoke and raised it to his face and splashed it like wash water over his head, and rubbed his shoulders and chest and torso and legs as if spreading sun cream, and then put his arms back at his side and prayed silently as the old woman moved down the line.
My senses registered the scene as if looking through a soap bubble. Something bumped me and I looked up and it was Queequeg, sidling up next to me and looming tall.
He leaned down and whispered, “So, Irving, I know you seen some of our ceremonies before…Well, this one’s gonna be a little different. See we’re here by the ocean, and the plan was to make ceremony there by her waters, to let loose a whole raft of offerings, do this the right way, you know, according to the original instructions. But the fuckin’ federales are guarding the beaches and every time they see a bunch of Indians sauntering down there they start firing off teargas canisters…. So the original instructions are out the window….” He did that reverse nod that he’d always done, where he throws his head back and points at you with his chin, twice, three times, and then a punched me sharply on the shoulder, and sidled away.
After all had been smudged, the woman spoke some words, long and strange and filled with clicks and swooshes. Some of the men quietly nodded their bowed heads. I held myself as still as a schoolboy. When she was done she said, quietly, “All my relations,” and then loudly, “A-ho!” and we all repeated after her, “A-ho.” And then she withdrew, or disappeared, and Queequeg stepped into her place.
He gestured to me to disrobe, quickly, and I did, down to my underwear. Of course it felt silly, but what could I do? “Let’s get to it,” I thought, kicking myself.
When I was undressed, Queequeg nodded in approval, took in a breath, and said, “To the four directions, brothers! Swim!”
All at once everyone leapt into the pool and I leapt in too and almost organically we fell into rows. And at Queequeg’s command we started swimming laps.
“To the east, where our father reaches to us with his warm hands and invites us to feast with Him for another day!” he called out, and we swam in a line to the east.
“To the north, where our ancestors collect stones to build houses where we may rest when we make our journey to meet them there!” and we swam to the north.
I swam as if my life depended on it, and as I swam I somehow took in the scene as if watching from above. It was like the synchronized swimming in a Busby Berklee movie, only instead of lank sequined girls with pale shoulders and long dangling limbs, they were Indians: Cherokees and Kiowas and Creeks and Mandans and Dakotas and Sioux and Haudenosaunee, Mohawks and Algonquins and Pomo and Osage and Anishinabe, and they were all men, in buckskin speedos and tanned armbands of twisted hide. Some were tattooed, like Queequeg, and some not, some big and rotund and others slender, but all were muscular, skin the color of iron oxide dust. And there I was among them, tearing through the water.
“To the west, where the tail of the deer leaps into the jaws of the horizon!” Queequeg called out, and we swam to the west.
“To the south, where the crane and the peregrine travel to summon back the rushing waters.” And we swam to the south.
As we climbed out of the pool, Queequeg handed out towels, and one by one we dried off and one by one took our places again on the slick aquamarine tiles. Now, Queequeg addressed us, in a voice I’d not heard before.
“On the other side of town,” he said, “to the West, in the direction of Chichen Itz’a, our Mayan brothers are gathered, and they are sharpening their machetes. On the beaches to the South, the Africans are gathered, casting their coconut shells on the waters to pray to Oshun that obstacles be removed. To the North, the women are gathered, led by Champa Devi and Rasheeda Bee, two tiny ladies from Bhopal, the one a Muslim, the other a Hindu, and by Phoolan Devi, the bandit queen, the one with no religion, and there they are teaching the women in their battalion the martial arts of aiki-jiu-juitsu and capoeira and abir. And to the East…the endless sea, whose poor state of health reflects our own, and whose cleansing force, brothers, is also our own.”
“Throughout our long history, brothers, we have fought many battles. We have won some, but in the end, they have always cornered us, in the Greasy Grass and in the Fallen Timbers, at Plum Creek and Platte River Station, in the Revolt of the Pueblos and the Chaco Canyon massacre, in the Sand Creek massacre and the Seminole War and the Modoc War and the Battle of Sugar Creek, on Smoky Hill Trail and the Great Sioux Wars. But we have always fought on. Today brothers, begins another such.
“And if we are afraid, we are justly afraid,” Queequeg said, and the air vibrated with his words. “And if we are worried, and anxious, and faint of heart, we are justly so. But today, as in our battles of the past, we know what the stakes are, and we know who the enemy is, and we know that this is our last fight. Brothers…” the air smelled of chlorine and the dappled light skimmed off the pool casting rainbows across the men’s chests and legs as if the entire gallery were a prism. “…It’s a good day to die.”
III
On the pale spit of land that curved along the edge of the sea, day fell into evening, and evening vanished into night. Inland, in the hotel zone, lights began appearing, and the invisible current of underground waters was drawing into itself what little life remained in the city.
The bedrock of Cancún, of Yucatan, is a limestone shelf, almost a mere ceramic plate, below which saline streams of ancient water run. There, below the ground, forces were gathering. There, the ghosts of ancient battles stood in wait. In the greenish shadows of those cavernous rifts, amidst piles of bone and powdered shells, an army gathered, preparing to advance upon the slimy mist of the city of above. In the air, heat lightning strobed menacingly against the darkened sky.
*
Queequeg took me to the casino next door for a steak dinner, and to brief me on what was to come. We sat at a table set with white tablecloth and fine fake silver cutlery beneath a cut glass chandelier, the clatter of the gaming room ringing beyond a partition, as Mexican waiters brought us cut after cut of meat: chorizo, butifarra, asado, costilla, churrasco.
Queequeg dug in with fork and knife and I followed. With his mouth dripping steak fat, he set in:
“Forget everything you learned in school about the United Nations,” he said to me. “The events you are about to witness will reveal to you the true nature of this beast. And beast, I’ll add, is too good a name for it.”
“I still don’t understand what it has to do with the rhinoceri,” I said.
Queequeg’s eyes cast about in the air for something to land on.
“Look, the truth is, I don’t know. Yet. At best, the rhinoceri give us a clue. There is a connection. There has to be, Irving. There always is,” Queequeg said. “You know this: if you want to unravel a conspiracy, you have to understand the relationships, the nodes, the networks. The web of life.”
He paused.
“Now forget about the rhinos. The only way to catch a wild rhino is, you don’t think about him, ok? Think about other stuff, but let the rhino do his own thinking and maybe he’ll decide to show up. That’s the way we’ve always done it, since way back.”
“As to the matter at hand: what they are doing here, what they are planning to do here, is to sell off everything, the water, the earth, the air, the animals. The plants. But sell if off isn’t right, I mean, that’s not the right way to put it,” he said. “They are going to turn it into money.”
“Isn’t that what they already do?”
“This is different. This is a whole ‘nother scale. They have made all the commodities they can make, they have produced all the products they can produce, they have consumed all the consumer goods they can consume. How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, after all? Well, a woodchuck can only chuck as much as its ecosystem will allow, which is de facto always less than ALL of it. But a fucking human being, Irving? He can chuck it all. And he just about has.”
A team of Mexican waiters in white starched suits brought a rolling cart piled high with steamed lobster, buckets of tiger prawns, clams and crab, a tray of oysters Rockefeller and bowls of butter and lemon and filled our plates.
“But this isn’t just about using everything up, Irving,” Queequeg continued, cracking a lobster claw in his fist. “Now they’re taking it up a few notches. They know they’re out of resources: the end of oil, the end of water, the end of soil, the end of 5 million years of sunlight captured and compressed in the fossil carbon underground. And they know that the people of the world will not tolerate their graft any longer. So they’re planning on taking everything that’s left, and in order to do that, they need to do away with resistance. And because life itself is resistance, they need to eliminate all life. And,” he said forebodingly, “they have the means to do it.”
Just then a racket went up from the casino and the waiters in the restaurant all stopped pushing their carts and turned to see. A group of men had entered the restaurant and evidently there was something about them. They were clearly here for the UN gathering, as there were dignified Africans in dashikis and skullcaps and South Asian men in embroidered caftans and Latin Americans in crisp tailored bankers’ suits, and leading them all, one hand waving in the air and the other gripping a gold-handled ivory cane, was an American in a white safari outfit, wearing a broad smile beneath his copper-blond moustache.
“Listen to me my friends – I have wonderful things to tell you,” he was saying to the entourage. “Gentlemen, it has been far too long that many of you, many of us, excuse me, have been overly concerned with money. Do we need money for the development of our countries? Of course we do. But more than this, more than this, my friends, we need life. LIFE!”
As he said the word he gripped his cane and waved it in the air with a flourish. Queequeg lifted his chin, indicating that I should observe closely, as he continued cracking shellfish and gobbling down bits of tenderloin.
“Gentlemen,” the man with the copper moustache said to his entourage, “Money is sand to me, rubies and diamonds, mere pebbles. My people come from the land of Ophir, where King Solomon found the gold for his temple. The Queen of Sheba was the matron of my lineage.”
“We have had money, and we have spent it, and we have earned more. Money, like water, like power, must flow, it must move or it grows rotten, and contagious, and it stinks. We are not here to talk about money…”
Why these men were having this boisterous conversation as they paraded through a public restaurant was unclear. But as they passed our table, the man with the gold-headed cane paused in his tracks for a moment and leveled his eyes at Queequeg.
“I see the Natives are here, restless as ever” he said. “Well, consider them, gentlemen. Contemplate, if you will, their wisdom.”
The group had come to a standstill, and though they were a cosmopolitan bunch, well-heeled brown-skinned denizens of the wide equatorial regions, the looks on their faces made them appear genuinely fascinated by Queequeg with his checkerboard of tattoos and his long silver braids and his determined frown.
“The Indian, my friends, was never interested in money. The Indian lived in service to the greater harmony of the world. And rightly so,” he said. “Up to a point.”
“It was an Indian who gave us that most noble of truths: we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children.”
The men following along nodded in genuine admiration.
“What that Indian failed to add, of course, was that we must therefore pay back the debt to our children, with interest. In order to do this, we need a new economy. One that can generate capital out of thin air, as it were.”
The man in the white suit with the gold-headed cane was gazing down his nose at Queequeg and speaking about him as if he were a museum docent explaining a natural history display. But his words sent chills.
And then he turned his gaze on me.
“And, ah, the Jews are here as well,” he said. “I’m glad. They may have a tempering influence upon the Indians…And if anyone understands how to generate capital out of thin air, my friends, it is the Jews.”
At this the man, whose words had me transfixed, suddenly broke through the invisible wall his strange lecture had affected, and reached out his hand toward me.
“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”
He smiled as he said it, and without wanting to, I found myself reaching to meet his hand. When he grasped my hand it felt at first cold, but then suddenly warm, hot even, and then like nothing at all, by turns hot and cold, like gasoline or like holding a cable with an electric current moving through it.
He continued speaking as he held my hand.
“Is not the Jew fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?” he said.
His eyes were blue and his hair sandy and his aspect forbidding, and then he let go my hand and turned away from us without a nod and kept walking, the entourage moving along with him.
“In any case, gentlemen, let us not be distracted. This gathering is one for which we have waited for a long time. It is already late to turn the tide.”
When the men had moved on, I asked Queequeg, “Who was that?”
Queequeg shook his head. “That,” he said, “is the face of the problem you are here to investigate.”
*
When we’d finished our surf n’ turf, it was well and truly nighttime, and Queequeg called a cab.
“We’re not staying at the Holiday Inn?”
“Uh, no,” he grinned. “We ain’t got money for hotels. The hotel was just for our ritual swim.”
I would sleep with rest of the delegation, he informed me, on the cement floor of a nearby sporting arena.
*
All night, as I lay in my sleeping bag on the concrete floor of a dissolute Mexican basketball court, the klieg lights blinked on and off with the load-shedding from the power grid. In my restless dreams, my beautiful Natasha was piloting a boat through turbulent waves that mounded up around her like piles of ice cream.
Sometime in the night a rough shove woke me, and a voice in the dark.
“Irving? Irving. Wake up.”
It was Queequeg, a looming shadow at my side. As I raised myself up to sit, I saw he was wrapped in a Pendleton blanket, his hair tied in long braids with ribbons and feathers at the ends. Resting on his open palms was a long clay pipe.
“Irving,” he said in a low voice. “Do you know what happens when the world ends?”
I coughed and shook my head. “Everything stops? Lights out? Game over? No,” I said. “I have no idea. How could I?”
“Irving,” Queequeg said. “We need to have a smoke.” He held the mouthpiece of the pipe to his forehead, and then turned it to the four directions, saying words under his breath. Then, from somewhere beneath his blanket, Queequeg produced a cedarwood box, and opening it, a burning coal. He lifted the coal with his thick calloused fingers and touched it to the bowl of the pipe and drew in a long breath.
“All my relations,” he said. “O Mitakiya.”
He passed the pipe to me and I took a long draw and felt the smoke blanket my lungs, held it in my chest, and let it out into the dark humid night of the basketball stadium. I handed Queequeg the pipe, and he smoked, and then we passed it back and forth as he spoke.
“The world will end, perhaps soon,” he said. “And this time, it will be worse than the times before. It will not be an easy world ending. It will come with great suffering, and great violence. This is our prophecy.”
“The last time the world ended, it ended in ice, and cold, and darkness. The time between worlds was long, and many souls were shed. We were in a great void,” Qeequeg said. “ A great darkness that lasted for many eternities. We floated in this darkness, without light, without warmth, without the security of land, or of water, or even of air.”
He draw on the pipe and passed it to me and I smoked and passed it back.
“We made a circle,” he said. “We put the children in the middle, to protect them from the cold. And we put the women around the children, to protect them from the darkness. And the men were on the outside, in many circles, the smallest and weakest toward the middle, and the strongest and bravest on the outside. When one of us died, of cold, or of hunger, or of thirst, we collected the body up, and we passed it to the women, and they cut the body up, and they fed it to the children. At first there were no tools; they tore the body to pieces with their hands, and fed it to the children, the organs and the fat they gave to the children, and the muscle and meat they kept for themselves, and the bone and sinew they passed to the men. From the bone, we made knives, and from the sinew and the skin and the hair we made clothes, to keep the cold off. We did this for thousands of years, for millennia. For eternity.”
“When the light began to come back, we prayed and we gave thanks. We had no words yet, our mouths were frozen and our hearts were like closed fists and our eyes were unopened, like newborns, but we prayed in silence. We had survived, and we were stronger than the last time. We had bone tools, and human hides for clothes, and some of our children had survived, and we were prepared to start the world anew. We prayed and we prayed, and when we had prayed enough, a heron flew over, and it gave us words. We sang then, and when we had sung enough, Father Sun began to rise, and His rising struck a flame on the earth, and it gave us fire. And we kept the fire inside our circle, our great Elder, and we spoke to Him and we fed and nourished Him, and when we had nourished the Old Man enough, a deer came out of the darkness, and it gave us tobacco. We smoked and our smoking was an offering, like our smoking now, Irving. And little by little, the world came back. And we were ready for it. And it was good.”
Queequeg bowed his head and fell into silence, a long silence, and the darkness over Cancún began to lift and the basketball court grew visible, the bleachers empty around us in the pale, thin dawn, and the others began to stir in their sleeping bags.
When the light of the sun had grown less diffuse, and struck us with the warmth of its first morning rays, Queequeg finally spoke again. “This time, Irving, this time, the world will end in fire. And it will not be so easy as it was the last time.”
He stood up and threw his long braids over his shoulders, and wrapped the clay pipe in a hide, and rolled the hide tight and tied it with a piece of sinew and he snugged it into his Pendleton blanket wrapped around him.
“Be prepared, Irving,” he said, taking one last look at me before turning to start the day. “Be prepared.”
*
I slept another minute, then woke and showered in the men’s locker room and dressed, in a business suit as Queequeg had advised. With Queequeg and his posse, I boarded a bus toward the conference center. The event was being held in a complex of limestone pyramids behind a high security perimeter south of the city, on the Caribbean shore. Somehow, TO RUIN had managed to register me as their press liaison. With my badge and press card, I slipped easily into the labyrinth of the United Nations conference center and found my way to the computer galley in the press room.
“Volleys of arrows!” Queequeg intoned when we parted there. “Fire ‘em off hard and fast! Let the bastards know we’re here. Make ‘em circle the wagons, and when they do, we set the arrows AFLAME and burn the motherfuckers to the ground before they do any more damage.”
The proceedings took place on an isolated stretch of coast some kilometers south of the city, in a set of finely appointed conference rooms – the Ixcan Suite, the Chixoy Lounge, the Teosinte Parlor, the Aztec Room – in an enclave of dramatic refinement and assurance.
Here, behind closed doors, the world’s Power Holders would talk for days with the singular objective of forging a global agreement to negotiate a plan to develop a compromise to envision a scheme to identify an approach to agree as to whether or not to consider cooperating to dream up a way to deal with the climate crisis, which everyone could agree was possibly, or perhaps even probably, the greatest existential threat humanity had ever faced.
An eerie veil of silence hung like a sepia cloud over the proceedings – a luxury resort, palm trees swaying in the tropical breeze, the golf links deserted but for a stray child from the nearby barrios now and again darting out to swipe a golf-ball or a stale rind of tuna sandwich.
It was easy to speculate on the substance of the talks, easy to assume they consisted of the usual: buying and selling, property rights, trade obligations, borders, the glutinous membranes of embryonic business deals swimming suspended in gelatinous ooze as in a laboratory jar.
The silence of closed doors was punctuated each afternoon by terse press briefings in the Aztec Room. At the close of each briefing, the starched men in their blue worsted wool suits scuttle out like crabs to their dim pockets and fluorescent chambers.
But while the trappings were the same – the sepia cloud, the eerie cone of silence, the ooze – this was not your typical global power grab. This was different. The afternoon briefings, though they barely glanced the surface, were enough to make the difference clear.
*
I attended a number of these lip service serenades, doing my best to decipher speeches about the pressing need to preserve the world’s vanishing species, about the revolutionary business practices that were incentivizing world-saving activities, about the emerging biotechnologies that would promise a livable future. The briefings, in a vast florescent room where men in dark suits sat facing a lectern and a large screen, were presided over by Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee scientist. She wasn’t there in person – she no longer cared to burn up the atmosphere by flying, she said – but in absentia on a huge screen where her skin glowed an otherworldly translucent blue as she hovered above the crowd.
Men in suits gazed upwards, transfixed by the presence of this frail elder-stateswoman of tropical forest ecology, a woman as comfortable among chimpanzees as among men in suits. Her upper-crusty British accent seemed to send a ripple of positive neuronal vibrations through the crowd.
*
“Warmest greetings to you all,” she began. “I regret that I cannot be present with you physically today,” she said, her image projected on a screen. “In keeping with my commitment to the global environment, I have opted to speak to you from my home.”
“At this crucial juncture, there is little need to explain the dire straits in which we find ourselves as a species and as a planet. We are losing biodiversity faster than we are able to discover unknown species, taking vast stocks of medicines off our shelves and vast stores of life from our world. Historic storm events have become common occurrences, rivers are drying up, the Arctic sea ice may be gone within a decade, and the oceans are growing too acidic – too sour, if you will – to support life.
“But of all the urgent matters at hand in this conference, perhaps the most urgent is the protection and conservation of the world’s forests.”
“We all know that deforestation around the world is contributing to the warming of our planet. If we protect our forests, we not only slow down climate change, we preserve biodiversity; by preserving biodiversity in all of its complex interrelations, we help to maintain the health of the forest as a whole.
People living in and around forests have always had a special knowledge of the plants and animals living there that often goes beyond that of science. Yet, in the face of poverty, such understanding may often go disregarded as people struggle to sustain themselves. Over time the old way of living in harmony with nature is forgotten, or may become impossible due to population growth. And so their forests get more and more degraded and the animals become increasingly endangered.”
“How do we protect the biodiversity of forests in places where poverty threatens the integrity of forests as people struggle for their very livelihoods? If forest protection programs worldwide can be developed with proper regulatory mechanisms, then we can indeed have hope for the future. Hope that our childrens’ children may one day live to see the wonders of these natural cathedrals.”
“Your task, my friends, is nothing short of restoring the temple of life to its original magnificence. And anything short of complete success means the entire biosphere is handed over to ruin.”
“In closing, and in homage to the world’s forests, let me leave you with the voice of one who cannot raise his voice to defend forests here at this global summit: the chimpanzee.”
Dr. Goodall sucked in her cheeks and pouted her dry British lips, and proceeded to perform an imitation chimpanzee call: “Oo OOO oo OOo ooo Ooooo!” Her eyes bulged and her face flushed: “Oo OOO oo OOo ooo Ooooo!”
The crowd went wild.
*
And that was it. A brief set of platitudes about the urgent need to do something, and then the room was cleared. But what was it she said about handing the planet over to ruin? That was strange. A clue? Perhaps…
Each day for the next week of the Summit I would attend these talks, trying to glean a sense of what was being thought, and done, and undone, by the global elite pulling the strings. While I gathered intelligence, the delegation of Unsettled Indians would be engaging in a thousand tactics to delay, disrupt and derail the event. And each night I would report back to To Ruin, and write press statements, and arm up the Indians with gossip to fuel the trench warfare they were engaged in. Between the closed-door sessions of the governments and the empty words of the public briefings it was difficult to find ways to intervene…but strategic opportunities did present themselves, and a sort of plan of attack emerged.
During the days, we worked – lobbying delegates, holding strategy meetings, writing press bulletins, courting the media to tell some semblance of truth, some infinitesimal dram of the suffering that these power-brokers had unleashed, would unleash, were unleashing on the planet’s fragile crust of the vulnerable, the poor, and the ignored. At night, we encamped, a raft of Outcast Indians, and me, at the basketball court somewhere away from the lights and luxury of the hotel zone.
Months before, further south, Evo Morales the first indigenous President of Bolivia, had convened a gathering of the world’s most activated indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, fisherfolk and their co-conspirators in the social movements struggling to birth an Other World fit for the future to inherit, as against the unconscionable degradation wrought by the banksters in charge of this one. The result had been a signed charter, the People’s Accord on Climate Justice and the Dignity of Mother Earth and Humankind, which was to be put on the table here in Cancún, as the starting point for discussion.
But from the get-go there was little practical possibility of seeing that document gain the support of the Powers-That-Be. The fight was asymmetrical at best: on their side, the stone-faced captains of industry; on ours, the tender children of Tomorrow. On their side, the cruel arithmetic of capital; on ours, the oblique fist of Poetry. On their side, sealed fate; on ours, the trackless plains of breezy Possibility. On their side, the schooled crookedness of gangsterism; on ours, the multiple personalities of Hope.
*
On Sunday night, immediately following Ms. Goodall’s speech, the UN announced that talks would proceed with no regard for the People’s Accord on Climate Justice and the Dignity of Mother Earth and Humankind, ratified in the high Andes months before by scores of thousands of popular movements and unsettled Natives. That night, anonymous agents littered the streets of Cancún with thorns: acacia, ceiba, nopal, saguaro, euphorbia, the unnamed spiny protuberances of Amazonian trees, the fangs of cobra, the spines of stingrays and the quills of porcupines.
By Monday morning, the streets were stalled with stranded taxis, their tires punctured and airless.
*
Monday morning I woke and washed and polished my shoes and combed my hair over and straightened my tie and draped myself with lanyards of credentials and took a bus with dozens of delegates to the main conference center they called the Moon Palace. The buses, maybe due to heavy-duty steel-belted radial tires, were getting through.
Security at the Moon Palace was no small affair, and by the time I’d gone through several metal detectors, been scanned, frisked, questioned, and virtually plucked clean, I arrived just in time to hear the Prime Minister of Norway give a lengthy discourse, hardly worth repeating here, about his nation’s exemplary and robust agreement with the impoverished and almost entirely unknown nation of Guyana, which, from what he implied was somewhere between Africa and South America, and was in dire need of Norway’s help. The audience of eager journalists and civil society hangers-on applauded fervently, but the applause was broken when a man stood up from the third row, and raised a hand.
The man, with café skin tone and wearing a blue blazer with a lemon-yellow sash, waved a hand in the air and said, “Please, please! If I may…I am the President of Guyana, and I would like a word.”
Jaws dropped.
“Please, yes, by all means, your excellency,” the Prime Minister of Norway said.
“Thank you, Mister Prime Minister,” the President of Guyana said. “But before I fall to bended knee in gratitude for your beneficent generosity, I must reveal a little…problem. To wit: I can’t get the money. If we were exporting rice or sugar we would get money for our development process. But in this case we have to jump through too many hoops.
The audience rustled. The Prime Minister of Norway smiled and brushed his cravat.
“I have been calling you about this matter for weeks,” the President of Guyana continued. “But you don’t seem to pick up your phone.”
He held up an old Nokia flip-phone and pressed a button and seconds later the Norwegian Minister’s own phone jingled in the pocket of his silk suit. The crowd stirred.
“SO,” asked the President of Guyana. “Where’s the money, Mister Minister? The money. M O N E Y, money, as in ‘can’t buy me love,’ Mister Minister, but perhaps could buy me grain? Perhaps could buy me roads? Perhaps could buy me electric transmission lines and malaria prevention and a national sanitation system. Hm? Can’t buy me love, can’t buy me forests, no sir, but perhaps, Mister Minister, could buy me into the architecture of power, I spell P O W E R.”
The Prime Minister of Norway looked dour. He raised his chin and opened his mouth to speak. But then his mouth closed again. Before another world was spoken, a security team moved in and had the President of Guayana removed.
*
Tuesday morning, steel barriers went up at either end of the Zona Hotelera, the area of the city where most of us were lodged. Masked snipers appeared on the roofs of the Playboy Palace, the Copacabana and the Hotel Mickey Mouse. The network of barbed wire in front of the hotel zone drew fractures across the deadening scene like cracks spreading over the surface of a porcelain dish.
*
Tuesday’s inspirational talk was hosted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
As I took my seat, Sam Hasbin, the President and CEO of Walmart took the podium.
“Thank you,” he said. “As the world’s largest retailer, it is incumbent on Walmart to become, as well, the world’s greenest retailer. I know, friends, that this may sound like a challenge, even a contradiction; after all, we are aware that the development of industry over the past hundred and fifty years has depended on savage depredation, on our willingness, that is, to appreciate that there is no production without destruction. But the hour is getting late, and such, dare I say, primitive means no longer serve us. Does this mean we must simply roll over and go out of business? Of course not! This is, as we know, unthinkable. [Applause] What it requires, to the contrary, is that we roll up our sleeves and get in bed with the environment. It is time to put into practice that slogan that is on so many of our lips: we must do well by doing good.
“In the next forty years, we will be adding 4 billion people to the planet. (Not Walmart, that is, humanity. Pardon, a little joke…) This means we’ll need to feed them, as well as feeding those billions who still don’t have enough food. To do this, I think we need to look at landscapes and ecosystems as the basis for meeting this growing need. Now, using the market approach, turning these landscapes and these ecosystems, essentially, into cash, is the single most lucrative approach, and the single most ethical approach. Indeed, it is the only approach.
“You know that over the past decade, Walmart has committed to selling organic food, and we quickly became the world’s largest retailer of same. We committed to putting solar panels on all our stores, and now we are selling solar electricity to the U.S. electric grid. We began composting our waste and became the biggest producer and retailer of topsoil in the world. We began purifying our wastewater and became the largest producer of fresh water since the Mississippi River. All of this has served us well, and has served our markets well. This, my friends, is doing well by going good.
“But the largest untapped market in the world, and the fastest growing market in the world, has yet to be exploited. The market I refer to is the poor. In our home country, we have served the poor by giving them jobs, and on a vast scale. More poor people now work at Walmart than have ever worked at any single company in the history of mankind. [Applause].
“But, as we know, the poor in the U.S. can hardly be considered poor by the index of global poverty. In order to truly make a difference, we must not only exploit the poor, we must exploit poverty itself.
“By putting forests into the market, by putting environmental services into the market, by putting air and water and soils and rocks and sand and lichens and grubs and moss and worms, and even germs, into the market, we create value for these things; we enhance their sale-ability, and thus regenerate their supply-chains. Similarly, by bringing the poor into the market, we ensure that they will not be abandoned, nor left behind, but will remain just as they are, only moreso; we give them comparative advantage; we make their poverty an asset.
“As we know, there can be no abundance without scarcity. There can be no wealth without poverty. There can be no getting ahead without leaving behind. Now, friends, it is time to serve those who have been left behind. By this I refer to the underdeveloped world – for, likewise, there can be no development without underdevelopment. By bringing the developing world into the market, we can step up the scale of buying and selling in order to meet the needs of both the world and the market. The market needs the poor; the market needs the earth; the market, like the environment, needs its own detritus. Just as we turn waste into topsoil at our Midwest retail outlets, and have restored the soils of the American heartland to a status and a depth they have not enjoyed since the days of the conastogas, we must now turn the poor, the marginalized, the left behind, the abandoned, into the greatest source of wealth since the Middle Passage.”
The crowd burst into sustained, rousing applause.
I fled post-haste to the safety of To Ruin’s compound to share what I’d heard.
*
On Wednesday, courtesy the clandestine forces of To Ruin, the female delegates to the Summit woke to find mysterious runs in their panty hose, forcing them to wear pantsuits. The male delegates – to a one – woke to find that their neckties had been clipped short.
A chaos of fashion semiotics ensued: some delegates chose to forego the tie, showing their comfort with casual dress; but most donned the clipped accoutrement. By the end of the day’s meetings, the men had been separated from the boys: the gelded necktie became a sign of solidarity among the Power Holders. “Wear it with pride,” became the slogan, and “Some is better than none.”
(The London Guardian would later report that this division between formal and casual business attire signalled the moment of rupture between the so-called Annex One countries (the Power Holders) and the Small Island States, Less Developed Countries, and what some development professionals refer to in the literature as Least Habitable Human Habitats; ((that is to say, this is where the fissure opens between the First World and the Third World (((or, put another way, where the luxury cruise liner of civilization collides with the iceberg of Human History).).).
*
The delegate briefing that afternoon was given by Hinckle Hearst von Vampton, a scion of wealthy New York publishing magnates, and owner of the energy consortium Fire and Ice Enterprises. Von Vampton was a large man, in a three-piece suit with wide pinstripes and a stopwatch on a chain. Revealingly, he wore his necktie clipped, and emblazoned with the mysterious slogan, “Grow a New One.” Standing behind a podium before hundreds of UN delegates, von Vampton tamped the sweat beads from his wide pale forehead, knuckled a dram of saliva from his lower lip, and spoke to the crowd:
“I am honored and proud to speak following Mr. Hasbin’s talk of yesterday, as I believe what I have to share has much in common with what Walmart has done for the dirt of the world. Today we are proud, to announce a newly patented method of energy development. We call this method, ‘Fricking.’ While it is not, of course, simple – what is, in these times! – it is, as a procedure, more or less simple to explain, and so I will.”
“Let’s pretend you have a lawn. You see, beneath the grass in this lawn, but above the subsoil, is a layer we call the supersoil. The supersoil is a microfilament-thin layer, hair thin, thin as a razor, made up of the dew that slides down the leaves of grass and hardens into a sort of, a sort of sub-cebaceous cyst. And because it is made up of hardened dewdrops that accrete to one another, a sort of collection of droplets, we refer to it as dew-dew. And when our scientists discovered this layer of dew-dew – think of it as the crystal-thin layer of new ice on a puddle, or like the prima fascia between your muscle and your skin, a kind of organic tissue, really – they said, ‘What the frick is this?’”
“And then they noticed, because scientists are nosy like this, that the layer peels off, like Astroturf. It is this peeling off process we now call ‘Fricking’. And then, bringing it back to the lab, they noticed that the dew-dew separates easily into individual molecules of hydrogen and oxygen – it does this much more easily than water. And when they burned these molecules – because our scientists like to burn things – they discovered that they leave no emissions. And, so, our goal, in the Historic battle to save the climate, is to frick the dew-dew off of every square inch of lawn we can get our hands on.”
*
By Thursday morning the smell of sulfur and saltpeter hung in the air like methane gas above Cancún’s fetid swamp.
Small craft were prohibited from entering shallow waters.
Only a few jet-skis and parasailing boats plied the beachfronts.
In the distance of the horizon, the U.S. Fourth fleet appeared in hazy silhouette like an armada of Flying Dutchmen, that nautical harbinger of doom.
*
That afternoon’s briefing was given by R.J. Weasling, the biotech magnate. I’d heard of Weasling, the man known as the modern Mendel, who singlehandedly took plant-engineering from a single-gene-at-a-time soapbox derby to a robotic miracle of modern bio-industry. He was often in the news for creating unique organisms and engaging in frankensteinian experiments with human remains. In person, he resembled Buster Keaton – a dapper little man in round tortoise-shell glasses and – clever of him! – a red bowtie.
Weasling took a moment to survey the room before he spoke, and then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are aware that some months ago my company, BioHeaven, celebrated the birth of Synthia, the first computer-generated virus. When we unleashed Synthia, we made it clear that, even as her inventors, we had only the most vague sense of her potential. Well, what better occasion than a United Nations-sponsored gathering to share the news that, in our estimation Synthia is the answer to the global energy crisis. Our team has proven her capable of producing fuel the way other viruses produce the common cold. Let me tell you how it’s done,” he said.
Weasling waxed into describing how this virus, when inoculated into a club-moss and stimulated with a cocktail of royal jelly and refined white sugar, gave the moss the fantastic ability to excrete a compound with all the properties of diesel fuel. Great Green Gold biofuel™ he called it.
The next phase was to bring the fuel to production.
“Let me tell you how it’s done,” he said, bringing the room along on his scientific journey.
“In order to display our market advantage, we will carry out the production in spectacular fashion. First,” he said, “we will propagate our patented club-moss on every face of the BioHeaven global operations building, in Cincinnati, Ohio. And then we will stimulate a flood of fuel, which we will collect, refine, process, and ship, ready to drop in to any diesel engine out there, from scooters to aircraft carriers.”
The scheme was ambitious, but achievable, Weasling told the rapt audience. First, a moat would be built around the base of the BioHeaven central lab. The building’s concrete facades would then be impregnated with spores of the Synthia-inoculated club-moss. When the moss reached maturity – a matter of mere weeks – the company would aerially detonate a device over the building composed of sugar, royal jelly, and surfactants to increase propulsion, adherence, and solubility, and then let nature – or, biogeophysics, Weasling said, work its magic. The excreted green gold precursor liquid would collect in the moat, be siphoned off into underground vats, tested thoroughly for safety and stability, and refined into market-ready drop-in biofuel.”
As Weasling spoke, you could practically hear the cash registers ch-chinging in the heads bobbing above the room’s dark-suited men.
*
As the room cleared, I felt a familiar slight vibration in my shirt pocket: my Blackberry Phone. There was a message on the screen, from Queequeg, that said simply: “The tide is rising.”
*
On Friday morning, early, I joined Queequeg and a busload of Unsettled Indians to arrive at the Conference Center before the talks began. Queequeg was stretched to breaking from the tension, and his focus seemed off…. His broad chest seemed slightly thin, and the marble-shine was off his eyes. His talk beaver hat was crumpled and even his tattoos had lost their luster. He seemed tired.
Queequeg briefed me on the day: “Today’s the day they push through their Green Climate Fund and their Biodiversity Premiums and their Oxygen Speculation and their Ocean Shock Therapy. All of it. If we don’t win the battle of history today – if we don’t come out of this with our ontological foot rammed up their tender Sphinx of Giza,” Queequeg paused and put his large hand on my padded shoulder. But just as he opened his mouth to put the finale on his pep-talk, my phone rang.
*
As if the planet were orbited by electronic ears and eyes, floating circuit boards that could pass messages between hemispheres, or between estranged family, between a remote father and his abandoned Little One.
As if it were Sunday morning (but it was only just Friday), and just as battle is to be joined…
A call came in on my Blackberry phone…
“Natasha!”
“Dadda, listen!” The phoneline crackled. “I’ve received a strange call. You have to know about this…”
“Do tell, honey.” I gestured to Queequeg with a scrunched face and stage-whispered, “gotta take this call…”and walked a little ways away, toward the Men’s room.
“The call was from a man who said his name was Green Goblin,” Natasha’s voice peeped through the phone. “A strange man. He had a voice like nails on a chalkboard. He said, ‘Go to your bookshelf, look after your books…’ and he hung up. So I did, I looked, and I saw It’s Mine was gone. The Lorax was gone. Where the Wild Things Are was gone. Goodnight Moon was gone.”
“Goodnight Moon?”
“Goodnight Moon. Then, he called back, and he said, ‘Tell your dadda, the great books will all be disappeared, if he does not leave Cancún, today.”
“What the…?”
“And it’s true, dadda, what he said is true. The great books are disappearing.”
“The great books? What do you mean the great books?”
“From the libraries. Vanishing. I began doing research. First in Baltimore, then in some place called Hermosillo, and now, we hear, at the University of Islamabad.”
“Which books? Shakespeare, Spencer, Milton?”
“Ha, no! The other great books. bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Rabindranath Tagore, the haikus of Mao tse Tung, the haikus of Langston Hughes, the haikus of Simon Ortiz! Tariq Ali, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ishmael Reed…Julio Cortazar, for God’s sake. Salman Rushdie!”
“What, again?”
“It’s happened before?”
I flipped through my mental clippings file. “Fantomas salutes you,” I said.
“What, dadda?”
“Nevermind,” I said. “This has happened before. In the 1970’s, between the 1972 Olympics in Munich and the Fall of Saigon…. Only, then it was the great white books, Chesterton, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Dickens. No one remembers the affair, it was wiped out by Watergate, and LSD, and mass torture, and Reagan and structural adjustment programs. A man named Fantomas, no, not a man, a kind of superhero, came to the rescue. It turned out…”
My voice trailed off.
“What Dadda, what?”
“It turned out the World Bank was involved. Operation Condor. The Pentagon. Honey, look, I’ve gotta go. Thanks for the news.”
I hung up, and ran to find Queequeg.
*
It was 1975, and I was on the train from Brussels to Paris. I was just returning from the Russell Tribunal, a week of testimonies of people who had endured torture by the brutal dictatorships of Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia. I was on assignment for the Barb.
“Tickets!” bellowed the conductor.
It was an exceptional moment… The culture of the world was aflame, and I was on my way to interview Fantomas, the superhero, about another mystery that was afoot: the disappearance of the world’s great books.
The mystery began when the Director of the Library of London made a terrible discovery: In the section of rare, antique books and original manuscripts, 200 were suddenly gone. They’d been there the day before… What could have happened? Eight days later, the scene was repeated in Paris. Victor Hugo, Gautier, and Proust, to name just the most famous – their manuscripts, gone.
*
Across from me in the cabin sat a considerably attractive woman, a platinum blonde in a tight leotard, not exactly my type… I believed she was Italian…On my lap a worn copy of Ulysses.
“Who could this be?” I wondered. But I kept my focus: I was taking advantage of the leisure of train travel to systematically work through each and every book by the great writers I kept in my traveling valise until some clue came to light, and I had just managed to read the first sentence: “STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” when the Italian blonde glanced up at me.
Her long knees touched mine, and a hint of garter was displayed below a pale thigh. Ophelia was home at Ambergris minding the shop and, well, I was a fox treed by the hounds of destiny…
It was a question of how to make conversation.
I was on the verge of making a clever comment about Joyce, but her eyes were glued to an issue of Vedettes Intimes, an Italian gossip magazine the details of which don’t matter here.
“Will it bother you if I smoke?” I asked, in my bad Italian.
“Au contraire, I was working up my nerve to ask you for a light,” the blonde said in a mix of continental languages, tearing herself away from the divorce columns.
“Am I correct that you are Italian?” I asked her. “Something in your accent, or perhaps your hair….”
“From Rome,” she said, and gave a radiant, ecumenical smile.
“Rome? Precisely in Rome, terrible things are happening,” I told her. “Have a look.”
I showed her the newspaper I’d been reading. Front page, above the fold: the Vatican library had been sacked.
“Non e possible!” she said and contorted her body to read the news.
“And they destroyed the entire library?”
“A very ancient edifice,” I said. “Besides which, just imagine: Dante, Petrarch and Petronius…! Not to mention Chaucer, Chesterton, H.G. Wells…”
At just that moment, when I had paddled halfway across the vast cultural lagoon between us and had startled her with the news, suddenly a slim young man with long dark hair and a thin black tie passed through the train car singing, in English, a song from The Three-Penny Opera:
Oh the shark has…pretty teeth dear,
And he shows them…pearly white
Just a jack-knife…has Macheath dear
And he keeps it…out of sight.
The man passed into the next car, but not before your astute narrator understood that this man was Fantomas himself. Before things got stranger, I decided to fold up the newspaper and close my eyes (the Italian girl, ignoring me again, returned to the grave financial problems of Aristotle Onassis) and I let myself slide slowly downhill in the toboggan of my exhaustion.
Eight days of work in the Tribunal, and the final meeting had lasted into the wee hours that morning: hour after hour listening to witnesses and rapporteurs offering verbal proof of the repression that snuffed out the lives of so many in Latin America, and the role of the multinationals in pillaging the economies and dominating the public policies of these countries, because economic domination demands other dominations, with many accomplices and many victims, and the repetition ad nauseum of murder, torture, persecution, the filthy hell of prisons, and no end to it, no end at all in sight. I can still hear the echo, decades later, of the cries in the Santiago Stadium, of the young musician, Victor Jara, who watched his culture broken along with his fingers, the screams, and the ringing demand for accountability, the cry for reparations for the incessant violations of human rights and the rights of each and every people to self-determination and economic sovereignty. Every so often, as a sort of obstinate recurrence, someone would take the stand to testify of his torture. A Chilean would share the techniques used by the military, an Argentine, a Uruguayan, a repetition of successive hells, the same electric cables, the same bucket of excrement, the same file under the cuticles, the same kick in the balls. And so, to escape from all of this (from the psychic reproduction of all of this violence!), I took on a different assignment, like a curtain of smoke: the comfortable train from Brussels to Paris, a Fantomas comic book, a platinum blonde Italian girl whose ankle had just ever-so-slightly brushed my own….
Fantomas – the man who must have been him, dressed, though, in street clothes, passed through the traincar again, singing:
There are some who… live in darkness
And the others… live in light
And you see the… ones in brightness
Those in darkness… drop from sight.
*
I stopped and shook myself. I’d forgotten something important. I stared into the indigo obsidian face of my Blackberry phone for an instant, and then I knew what had to be done. I dialed back.
“Natasha, honey, how are you?
We talked a little. “Dadda, I wanna come see you!” she said.
“No honey, non e posible. I’ll be home with you and your mama soon, sweeties. Now go to bed.”
“But dadda, it’s only morning!”
“Okay, honey, thanks for the news,” I said to Natasha. “Time to go night-night.”
“Okay, dadda,” she said, her voice tiny as a goldfinch in a pet-shop window…
*
I shook off the reverie and walked into the fluorescent briefing room, entering just in time to hear the speaker who would nail the proverbial coffin shut – the President of the World Bank.
The screen crackled into focus and Jane Goodall’s slim withered head appeared. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard from some of our greatest global leaders – leaders of business, leaders of government, the voices of those who can make the decisions that will determine our success or failure as a species. And now, without further ado, a man who knows more about poverty, more about environmental destruction, more about what lies ahead than perhaps anyone else. I give you, Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank.
*
A roar went up from the crowd as a man walked onstage. In a white linen suit with sandy hair, a moment passed before I saw…the gold-handled cane. It was none other than the man from the casino. A chill ran through me.
Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, the man with the gold-handled cane, his moustache bristling like a brass scouring brush, mounted the podium, that is, the stage, and cleared his throat to speak.
“Thank you for your applause,” he began. “But there is no need. Just throw money.” (Laughter.)
“I will be brief,” he said, “and to the point, for the times call for brevity, and the times call for putting a fine point on some very dull issues.” (Laughter again – this guy knows how to work the crowd!)
“I think if there’s any lesson we can draw from the climate crisis,” he went on, his claws grasping the podium, “it’s that we don’t have time to wait. And if there’s any issue that’s ripe for the plucking, it’s the world’s rich biodiversity.
“It is absolutely clear,” he continued, “that our plan to save the world’s forests by building a market for fresh air enjoys broad support all around the world. And its pretty easy to see why: it offers some very significant opportunities to achieve multiple goals, as Doctor Goodall said – for mitigating climate change, of course, but also for protecting species, protecting biodiversity and ecosystems, and, lest I fail to mention it, improving local livelihoods. The foot soldiers of forest protection are expecting our new programs to not only preserve species, but to open a new era of opportunity for global development as well. So we really need to see an agreement here in Cancún.
“We have 192 economies in the UN system. If we have 150 countries or 160 countries on board, lets get going. The others can join us later. I hope that the voices here can go to the delegates of the countries, and say, okay, lets close the deal. All of the multilateral development banks, among them the World Bank, have invested significant resources into making this work. We know that this is one of the best chances we have – maybe one of the last chances we have – to really save our rich animal and vegetable heritage.
“At the risk of sounding technical,” he said, “biodiversity is severely undervalued in the international system, and the sad result is that funding for conservation in tropical forests is paltry. We at the World Bank are here with our partners at the World Wildlife Fund, to announce the creation of the World Wildlife Premium Market Initiative, to firmly establish a price for all living things.
“We need to recognize the value of forests standing, rather than dead. This means placing a price on the trees, the soils, the wildlife, even the bacteria present in forests. These bugs are worth something! Lets get real, and recognize their real value. Buyers and investors can buy wildlife certificates for charismatic species that require large expanses of forest: tigers, jaguars, forest elephants, great apes, macaws, lemurs, all of these iconic species range over vast areas, and sadly, many of them are endangered. Moreover, if you map the ranges of the species, they cover most of the remaining tropical forest, and the most important areas for biodiversity. Protecting these species will protect the other flora and fauna that live under their umbrella. By valuing forests for their carbon capture potential, poor countries can earn much-needed income…and by introducing wildlife premium credits, these same countries will be paid for the number of species they protect.”
He surveyed the crowd.
“So, let’s get to it.”
The audience applauded wildly, and then Zoellick, the sandy-haired man with the gold-handled cane, opened his mouth wide, and wider, and to the great surprise of all, so it seemed to me, he let out a loud roar: “Raaaaahhhaaaaarrrr!”
*
((That very night, they say, the tigers began to walk away.))
*
A long and loud chorus of applause arose from the suit-and-tie wearing brigades of capital gathered there, as the screens that hovered over the stage like alien spacecraft flickered with scenes of forest-dwelling critters, four-leggeds, two-leggeds, and those that swim, creep, crawl, and fly. The thank you’s resonated through the theatre and the animal imitations began to fade, and just then, when naught but hunky-dory permeated the ether of that august gathering, a fish – a dead fish – flopped on stage, landing with a slimy SLAP! precisely and provocatively at the feet of Mister Zoellick.
“Yo! Mistah BANK!,” a young woman from Detroit hollered from the gallery, having grabbed the mob’s attention.
“I don’ know ‘bout you, but where I come from we don’ have the luxury to spend 1 dollar twice the way you people do, an’ its only the gris gris man from back in the Yoruba storybook that could speak to the animals the way you claim you do, Doctor DoLittle.”
At her side a man shook his fist in the air and belted out, “Who do you think, you’re the economic hoodoo man or some shit? You and Jungle Jane the Chimpanzee girl all actin’ like you Doctor and Missus Saint Francis, an then sellin’ off our flora and fauna right before our very eyes. That’s some kind of bitch-ass voodoo is what that is, Mister Zoo-log.”
At which the young woman took up again, screaming, “Why don’t you step on down from that stage and put a price tag on this, bitch!” – and she flipped a proud middle finger erect as a dancing cobra from its basket, and turned and stormed out.
*
But before she could get very far on her own locomotion…
*
…security had the young lady and her friend removed.
*
But, dear reader, friend – talk is cheap, and life, apparently is even cheaper. It is time to leave aside the code-talking bureaucrats and get on with it. So, what happened in Cancún?
[Visual: Newsreel screen test stripes flashes to Nazi troops saluting with open palm flashes to Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon flashes to Hells Angels at Altamont flashes to stock footage of the Mexican revolution: bandits on horseback riding down a train and firing at it with bolt action rifles; a trestle bridge explodes and the train crashes off the edge into a barranca; voiceover narrates:]
“This is Cornelius Westbrook Van Voorhis, bringing you the news from Mexico: While narco violence rages along the border and floods ravage the southern frontier, the Caribbean resort of Cancún is the site of metaphysical forces locked in battle the likes of which has not been witnessed since the time of Cortez…. The forces of good and the forces of evil are lined up and facing off like something out of [voice stutters as if stunned], why, like something out of Star Wars. Hold on folks, we’re in for a wild ride! For Universal Studios, this is Cornelius Westbrook Van Voorhis, signing off, as time…marches on!”
V
Between Chicxulub’s Cretaceous sinkhole and the postmodern morass of the United Nations Climate Conference, I sweated in my suit, my knuckles grown sore from the hail of press bulletins I released, and time marched ever on.
*
Dateline, Cancún, Mexico: As evening approached on the final night of the United Nations Conference of Parties negotiations in Cancún, with a final climate change agreement only hours away, Bruno Sekoli, Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group said, “The situation for us is extremely desperate. Our countries are already fighting for survival. The Pacific Island of Tuvalu could be swept under the water at any time. It is very worrying to imagine what will happen ten years from now at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, Chair of the African Group, said that if no binding emissions reduction targets came out of the U.N. meeting in Cancún, “75 to 100 million people in Africa will face water shortages and crop yields could fall by a third by 2025.”
The concern at that moment was that the agreement expected to come out of Cancún had no binding emissions targets, no regard for human rights, and a foundation deeply rooted in market mechanisms designed to further cement the divide between rich and poor (known to economists as the R-P divide).
Indeed, Bolivian President Evo Morales, speaking to the press from the Moon Palace earlier in the day said, “If from Cancún we send the Kyoto Protocol to the rubbish bin, we are sending humanity to its death. We cannot, behind closed doors, develop documents that are not based in the thinking of peoples and in the suffering of peoples. We have an obligation to listen to the peoples of the world who tell us how to cool the earth.”
A few hours later, as delegates dozed in their rumpled suits in the hallways of the Moon Palace, this is indeed what happened. The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, ended before dawn on Saturday with the adoption of what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change calls “a balanced package of decisions that set all governments more firmly on the path towards a possible negotiated plan to develop a compromise to envision a scheme to identify an approach to agree as to whether or not to consider cooperating to dream up the possibility of a livable future.”
The agreement is seen by critics as a document without content, a result of a coercive and non-transparent process which claims to have the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius – but which, without binding targets for emissions reductions, is a hollow promise with no basis in reality. A 2 degree rise for most of the world is a 3 degree rise for most of Africa, which will lead to catastrophic impacts for precisely those most vulnerable and least responsible for the crisis.
“In the human body,” said Marcus Aurelius Velazquez Colchón of Bolivia, “a temperature rise of one degree centigrade is a mild fever, two to three degrees an extreme fever, and four degrees for a sustained period is fatal. The Cancún Agreements, by failing to limit such a temperature increase, condemn possibly millions to their death.”
The Global Survival Coalition called the agreements “an invitation to suicide.” The Organ for the Rights of Unsettled Indian Nations – whose director, Queequeg Caliban’son, was barred from the conference for wielding a spear, along with Bolivian Ambassador Marcus Aurelius Velazquez Colchón who threatened the Conference Chair by revealing a javelin and atalatl beneath his suit coat – called the agreements “a betrayal of our future,” concluding that the United Nations has become “the vendor of the Sky and all the stars.”
Indigenous peoples have been embattled throughout the two weeks of the Cancún summit, with deep divisions within the Indigenous Peoples Caucus as to whether to take a principled stand or to accept the best bad deal they can get. TO RUIN appeared to act as a galvanizing force among First Peoples, until Caliban’son’s expulsion from the conference grounds.
“We will not be vanquished!” the Indian strongman said as he was cast out.
The discord at the Cancún talks was also shadowed by concerns about the sudden disappearance of the rhinoceros from the city’s swank “Casino del Conejito.”
Representatives from the Worldwide Fund for Nature were present at the climate talks in Cancún, but were unavailable for comment.
###
How could I take this in? How could anybody?
I did what any man of reason, any child of the Enlightenment would do – I went to the beach.
Coming out first from the suicidal city and then from the humid flame of the jungle, I emerged onto a spit of sand, white as the ground-up bones of time, and there I sat with the immensity of history, breathing in, breathing out, as if my body were the sea itself and my spirit, well…as if all of history were a dusting of sand or a light rain of dead moths over me. I was pinched and pinched again by twinges of discomfort; width seemed too narrow and breadth too close, all greenness looked withered and when I looked down at my blue serge suit, it was the blue of bruises.
After days of confronting the bureaucrats, my heart lost sense of all that my eyes couldn’t see and I lost my simplicity…Everywhere I looked I tried to see my Natasha, and my Ophelia, but in clouds of anxiety they cursed me and their curses echoed the cynical declarations of the businessmen who were drowning the world in their bilious tide of greed: “you’re dreaming, Irving, you’re lost, Irving, you’re a fool and an ignoramus, Irving.” Under this pounding my mind might choose any road to wander on and my spirit was too deep in sorrow to check it. No fence or wall could mark my path into the wilderness.
Sitting on my bleary haunches in the fine white sand, the wall of resorts towering behind me and the poster-blue Caribbean swashing tremulously before, my middle-aged body felt like clay and a world-weary baudelarian, beatitudinous, luminously dark melancholy exhaustion, A Great Sorrow, a kind of Paradise Lost feeling, as if the angel of light were falling forever into an abyss of darkness, washed over me in waves.
(Has this ever happened to you?)
*
That abundant sack of sadness, I think now in hindsight, was for my world, which was crashing down around me… But as much as this, my grief was also for my daughter who would inherit the ruins.
*
The last glaciation ended more or less 10,000 years ago, and it was then, precisely then, that –
the scientists say – humans crossed the Bering land-bridge; precisely then that grains and gourds were domesticated in the Indus River Valley, at Ur in the Fertile Crescent, along the holy Nile, in the floodplains of the Yangtze. After agriculture came trade, and writing, and the birth of the great cities – Nineveh and Samarkhand and Toumbuctou and Babylon and Alexandria. The agricultural revolution took hold, and over thousands of years a wave of great migrations spanned the globe. They settled – we settled – in more great cities, in Machu Picchu and Tenochtitlan, in Marakesh and Rome and Angkor Wat. Then, another, little ice age in the sixteenth century – there were other factors – spurred the industrial revolution, which took centuries to bear out. Then, the information revolution – in mere decades from teletype to Internet, a whiplash in historical terms.
And now, the end to all that. Perhaps.
Perhaps.
*
We who love domesticated grain and gourds, let us be warned. Our time, it seems, has come….
*
The tide was out and as I walked toward the wavelets, the pale, fine sand gave way under my feet to a spongy mass, like soaked peat, with sharp-edged shells driven into its soft tuft by endless successions of tides, the ocean forever churning and retreating.
I made my way toward the foam of the tidal basins, the sea’s edge, and as I walked – growing interested now in the possibility of shedding my suit and tossing myself into the brine, for a swim – the water seemed to retreat…It did, in fact, it was retreating. With each step forward, the lapidary sea slunk further out: the ocean was withdrawing before me like a serpent into its hole.
As I followed the timid, sucking ripples out, the land grew steeper, the incline of the continental shelf becoming with each few steps more precipitous. Now boats lay in the mud, now buoys sat on the calcium sediment, now trash and dead coral collected in the puddles. An exposed piece of culvert appeared, unsubmerged, its rusted lip unremarkable, its mouth dark and wide as a cavern’s opening.
Now the sea had retreated by kilometers, so it seemed: a mysterious vanishing. And then, I turned and peered into the blackness of the cavernous opening. I touched the rim of metal and felt a chill run through me.
Something there is that doesn’t love a hole.
*
I walked in, and walked on. I was drawn in by the darkness. The culvert pipe under my feet was ridged, the hollows filled with sandy mud. The walls dripped and the drips rang out in the humid air. Patches of slime clung to the ceiling.
As I walked deeper the light of day faded and then flickered out in a green flash and I was in darkness.
But only for an instant.
A strange phosphorescence welled up into my sight…perhaps around me on the cave walls, perhaps ahead in some remote chamber or Cretaceous cavern. The darkness retreated now step by step, just as the sea had above. My eyes grew accustomed to the faint glow. Suddenly, the floor grew slick and the light grew strange, like grains of sand filling my corneas, and I looked up and saw that I had entered a vast cathedral of stone: white, chalky calcite walls, stalactites hanging with prehistoric certitude, arches of stone looming into darkness, water moving through it all, and a smell like a salmonella sandwich…Suddenly I realized I heard a murmuring sound, like voices, distant, or…not so distant.
As my eyes cleared, I saw in the ivory folds of the cavern walls just beyond the faint radius of light, long splotches of dull red, imperceptibly moving. Gradually they took the form of great birds. They were macaws, chained to perches. Their eyes gave off an eerie glow that seemed to light the entire monumental chamber. From one end of the vast room to the other, where the floor fell away into darkness, a putrid river seemed to run, through cracks abandoned by the sun, toward some infernal sea….
And then I heard the voices.
*
I walked on, along a ledge of stone that circled up a cavernous outcropping, and the voices grew louder. What began as a mumbling echo became a man’s voice, speaking a language I understood. The darkness flickered. It was English. Suddenly then a piercing shriek echoed through the damp cathedral and resolved into a series of glottal bursts, like a hyena cackling. I rounded a corner and saw before me an incredible sight.
Beneath an enormous vaulted archway leading back into tunneling darkness, a curtain of blackened water carved sinuous patterns, dripping from the walls in a slow and constant flood. The tunnel, as far back as I could see, was filled with men – not men, in fact, but something more like hobgoblins, or…orcs! An army of them, groaning and stamping in place like restless cattle. A ghastly vision….
In the phosphor glow of some kind of algal spores that behung the cave’s ceiling, I could make out the orcs-or-whatever-they-were: their bloated, fanged, piggish faces all erupted like fungi from the tight collars of black suits with red neckties, or wide pinstriped jackets with yellow patterned ties; some had watch chains dangling from doublets, or i-pads tucked under their arms, or Bluetooth devices lodged in their grotesque, upward-pointed mangled earholes. And all of them, an entire phalanx, faced forward – toward where I crouched now, in a fissured dark corner of slippery stone – all tilting their heads and aiming their hollow reptilian eyes at a single point down below, and in front of me. Where the voice came from.
The orcs watched with rapt groans of indigestion, or hunger, as a man addressed them. His back was to me, and his face was shadowed, but he waved his open hand in bold gestures, and his voice was familiar. It was Sam Hasbin, the man from Wal-Mart.
*
“When we see a waterfall,” Hasbin’s voice said, pealing like dank Vespers in the cavy gloom, “we think we see an accidental cascade of water, or a limitless freedom of will, and even choice, in the innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the braided strands of wavelets. But in fact, comrades,” – comrades? I thought – “everything is necessary; each movement can be calculated, mathematically, with the utter-most precision. Thus it is with human actions too; if one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice, each generation of profit, each failure.”
The orcs grunted.
“To be sure, my fellows, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient, calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculable mechanism.”
*
The speech was so strange, the subterranean glow so disconcerting, the ranks of orcs so alien and horrifying – Orcs? Really? What doom-stricken fairy-tale is this? – that I had failed to notice a hanging thing, a wire cage the size of a large beast that trembled at the end of a rope, the whole apparatus cast in silhouette. Suddenly as my eyes fell upon it, a whimper arose from the creature locked inside, then grew to a keening whine, and then to a full-bodied shriek – “eehhh—ahhh—ooohhhh!”
The cage shook and the beast stood almost upright, gripping the bars with its long clawed fingers.
The orcs grunted and squealed as if in morbid laughter, a sinister cackle subsumed in shame or disgust. The creature in the cage stood and bellowed a pathetic piercing shriek –“ayy-eeeeeeeh!”
I could make out an upright figure, thin and bony, but almost human, and with a long mane of hair that reached straight to its hips, hair that in the quarter-light looked pale, gray, almost silver.
A primordial fear gripped me.
It isn’t?
I shrunk into my niche and squinted.
It couldn’t be…
Jane Goodall?
*
Offshore, a stretch from the hotel zone but not so far beyond the coral cayes at the continental shelf, the ebbing sea went slack.
*
The conference hall at the Moon Palace, a limo-ride from Cancún’s beach district, was oddly quiet. Closed-circuit TV broadcast government briefings from somewhere beyond the public plenary rooms. Queequeg and the Unsettled Indians cast about for targets, but the Press had vanished to the Mayan Riviera for the weekend, and no one of consequence was left. A melting pot of non-governmental organizations handed out flyers and paper pamphlets and mini-DVDs in plastic slipcovers, but the Powerful had vanished.
The Indians sat on the floor in their suits and beads, and smoked. Queequeg loosened his paleolith-patterned slate-colored neck-tie. He walked past the lackluster gaze of Security, between the gauntlet of magnetic body-scanners, through a turnstile that gave no resistance, and out of the conference center. The sun was high and palm trees swayed like Romany dancers against an electric blue expanse of distant sky.
Queequeg stood at the top of the steps as on a plinth, and stretched to his full height. His eyes took in the horizon, and then he looked about and pulled to him a metal folding chair, and he sat down in it and reached into a suit pocket and pulled out a plastic-wrapped ham and cheese sandwich on white bread, purchased at a UN concession stand for nine US dollars.
Queequeg surveyed the middle distance, and then he sniffed the air and spat.
*
The ocean stood still.
*
Below the ground, I huddled against cold rock and ground my teeth to silence my chattering jaw, as Jane Goodall pierced the air with the heaving, gut-wrenched cry of a caged chimpanzee.
The animal whining subsided and Sam Hasbin faced the orc-ish battalion and began gesturing again with his arms above his head.
“Gentlemen!” he intoned. “There comes a time in a man’s life when his assumptions about free will dissolve, and all that is solid melts into air. When man’s delusion falls aside like so much chitinous cocoon, and the calculable mechanism takes over.”
The orcs gathered up their saliva.
“Here in the caverns of Chicxulub, this venerable hole where the last great extinction began – the event that precipitated our rise to glory – we have gathered to make the great leap forward to the NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY! And so, without further ado, I offer you, Robert Zoellick, President and CEO of the World Bank!”
The falange of orcs erupted in cheers and grunting huzzahs. As Hasbin stepped down from the dais, and Dr. Goodall’s cage rotated above in silhouette, a vein opened in the cavern’s floor and a fine spray of vapor hissed through and suddenly thickened, hanging in the air, and slowly took form: a bath of shadows cast in a cloud of gas mutated to a horned and demonic shape, to a goateed hunching devil-tailed beast, to a man, standing, a white man, in a casual suit, with a thick toupee of hair and with flat-soled wingtip shoes. In the chiaroscuro glare, his cheeks looked sunken and his wire-bristle mustache took on a reddish glow, and he leaned into the podium and smiled over the assembled multitude.
When he spoke, his voice was human. All-too human.
“My friends,” he intoned to the gathered mass in dark business suits, “the Revolution, so long in parturition, has reached the moment of its delivery: now it must give birth or die.”
The mind-shackled mass before him shrugged their grubby appendages and slithered in their suits.
“The hour to finalize our preparations has arrived,” the demon Zoellick said.
“The end of History is at hand!”
Silence. Even the twisted rope of the primatologist’s cage held taught and still.
“And so, my friends, in order that you may bear finest witness to this apotheosis of all human wonders, let me tell you the course of history, from the perspective of those who have won.”
“The agricultural revolution, yes? Twelve thousand years ago? We spread across the earth, from the Great Rift Valley to the great river valleys, the Indus, the Yangtze, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Rhine. We organized ourselves in cities and cultivated the land. We tamed the plants. We walked to the ends of the earth and declared our dominion.”
“That was breakfast.”
“The industrial revolution: over several hundred years we set fires in the belly if the land. We controlled the course of rivers, and made machines that gave us power beyond the human form. We made money the measure of all things, and we centralized our power in the North. We tamed the fire, and the minerals, and the waters, and the wild spirit of our kind.”
“That was lunch.”
“The modern age. We showed that our powers to create, and to destroy, are boundless. We unhinged the jaws of fate. We drew borders and erased them, we dreamed entire sciences and lay them aside, we unlocked the juices of the earth and turned up the building blocks of life. We tamed the ether.”
“That was dinner.”
He surveyed the crowd. His anthracite eyes glittered and his teeth oozed a dark acid.
“My friends,” he hissed. “Now it is time for dessert.”
The grizzly bestial mass of orcs slurped its acrid fumes and bellowed on command, “Dessert, dessert, dessert! Dessert, dessert, dessert!”
Zoellick waited for order.
The darkness weighed.
Beyond, the ocean’s elastic snapped.
“My friends,” the demon Zoellick said, “This is our finest hour. I do not have to tell you that we are surrounded by hostile forces, like an island of brilliant bejeweled coral in a sea of bleach. They call themselves the bottom billion, the globophobes… Their academics and professionals use loaded obscurantist terms like ‘the social majorities’ and ‘grassroots global justice.’ But we know them – we have always known them, for what they are: Peasants! Savages! Barbarians at our gates… Their economists say that our future is bound up with theirs, and indeed, they are not wrong. But I would phrase it somewhat less delicately: our profits, my friends, are bound up with their losses… Our benefits, with their costs…Our competitive advantage, with their frail weakness…Our consumption, with their oppression. To put it most clearly, for we are at an hour when we can no longer afford to mince our words, our dominance, my friends, our dominance, is bound up with their misery!”
From the crowd of pinstriped orcs, a cry went up: “Our dominance! Their misery! Our dominance! Their misery! Our dominance! Their misery!”
*
I’d stepped out a hair’s width onto the ledge overlooking this black mass, my guts hollow and my blood cold, when a chirping sound split the heaving air.
“Fucking hell!” I fumed.
It was my phone.
From her cage, Jane Goodall craned her neck toward my shaded niche. Then the demon turned his glare toward where my Blackberry sounded in my suit pocket. And then the orcs, their frothy mouths agape.
“Fucking hell,” I said again, aloud. I fumbled in my pocket for the phone, and, with massacre encroaching, held it up and looked at the image on the screen.
It was Natasha.
“Fucking hell,” I said once more, this time to myself.
I pressed the green button.
“Hi dadda,” she said.
*
The ignorant army stood in vast, terrifying observance of my private call.
Natasha’s voice was tiny.
“Dadda!” she said. “Dadda, forget about the books, that’s the least of our worries. There are bigger problems.”
I gaped.
“Yes, honey,” I said. “I would agree.”
*
The ocean, overburdened, turned and charged full-bore at the land.
*
I looked at my phone in the palm of my hand. It glowed in the gloomy gloaming, and Natasha’s face looked lovingly upward to me – her ivory cheeks painted with a brush of pink, her dark komiku eyes scanning for me longingly in the digital horizon…
“Dadda, you’re not at work,” she said. She could see me, the sweat bulleting from my brow, the sepulchral surroundings. “Where are you?”
I looked up from the phone. By now, the orcs had seen me, and their grumbling was growing to a hot low roar of war. The demon Zoellick had seen me, and his eyes were hardened against me. The man from Walmart had seen me too, and he was loosening his necktie, which he wore cut, a battle trophy.
I said nothing.
“Are you in a cave, dadda?” Natasha asked, her voice reaching across landmasses.
“Uh, I am honey, yes. A sort of cavern. I think…I think it may be Chicxulub’s cavern.”
Jane Goodall wrenched her pinched, narrow head from east and back around to east like a screech owl, and let out a bellow, a haunted battle cry that ricocheted around the tunnel: “Ahhhhh-eeeeeeayyyyyy!!”
“Chicxulub’s cavern?” Natasha said.
*
A slight shift of the subterranean breeze, and the weight of the amassed army seemed to seethe and lurch and throw itself into motion toward me like a wave.
“SIEZE HIM!!!” the demon screamed.
Jane Goodall screeched in existential dread.
The orcs stampeded….
I stood to turn and flee but a puddle of slime brought me down, I slipped and fell face-first onto the crusted limestone shelf, “Oof!” and the phone slipped out of my hands. “Natashaaa!” The lit screen left a speckled diode trail on the cold rock as it clattered down the walls toward the black fissures below. I could hear her little voice calling back to me, “Daddaaa!”
But there was no time to lose, I scrambled up again, and saw the orcs already in my peripherals, almost overtaking me. And then an amazing thing happened:
When it hit the surface of the black underground water, the phone cracked into bits and fritzed into a blaze of sparkling phosphoric light. A great white light, pure and florescent, engulfed my vision.
The cave blazed in dripping illumination.
It seemed to blind the orcs, and they stopped in their tracks. They howled and raised their arms to shield their pus-filled, evil eyes.
The demon Zoellick was nowhere to be seen. In her twisted cage, Jane Goodall whimpered and wept. And before my eyes, the glow that engulfed the cave narrowed to a ray and cast itself against a stalactite, a strange blue beam splashing onto the spire of rock like a reflection in oil.
The cavern darkened again like a theater, and in the light an image grew: Natasha!
Then, behind me, like some rank Beelzebub, suddenly the demon Zoellick appeared, his nostrils spilling smoke, his hands raised like raptor’s claws and trembling, apoplectic.
Time stopped. My head roared, the cavern, my head, the tunnel, my being, the low roaring like an endless immensity of thunder.
Zoellick stood over me, at once pale and dark and strangely androgynous, like some mock Marilyn Manson, and he fixed his eyes on me, and he spoke.
“Are you laughing, Mister Irving?”
His blue suit seemed to be alive and crawling with maggots.
“Laughing,” I managed to say back. “No. Not laughing.”
His jaw split like the unhinged mouth of a rattlesnake and he let forth a gut-twisting hiss.
“I will tell you something,” the demon said. “When you seek exaltation, you look aloft. But I look downward because I am exalted. Mister Irving, can you laugh at once and be exalted?”
I gaped. He hissed again.
“Unmoved is my depth, Mister Irving. And unshadowed is my Power. You know nothing of Power.”
He opened his suit coat and reached into his vest and in his pale bony hand he drew forth a glittering blade.
I gritted my teeth and stood.
“I resist you!” I cried with all the force I could.
His lips turned upward. “You have nothing to fight me with. You – you and all of your piddly savages – you, are nothing to me.”
I looked into his demon’s eyes. They were empty, jaundiced, unmatched: one was dark and sunken and the other bright as neon.
He raised the dagger.
“I am resistance,” I spit.
“Resistance, Mister Irving – that is the distinction of the slave.”
His arm swung, but a burst of flashing light sent his thrust wild and a voice rang out, Natasha’s voice!
“By Estragon’s belt, you’re wrong, old man!” she cried.
Bathed in blue glow, Natasha leapt from the stalactite and flew through the air. She landed on Zoellick’s arm and wrapped herself like a python around it, grabbed the dagger barehanded from his fist and threw it skittering to the floor.
The demon just smiled.
“Show some respect, you little brat!” he spat, reaching for the blade.
*
The roaring grows louder.
*
And then the screen goes crosshatched with static…the picture scrambled…the sound reduced to a metal machine music. A tremendous caterwauling followed by enormous rattling tremors. A great explosion. Blinding smoke billows, roaring. A hot wind rushes through the tunnel. Behind it, a wave of bilious black water roiling with yellow foam comes crashing.
*
A pipe has burst…an ocean of sewage is rolling madly toward the sea.
*
And towards me.
*
Standing in her bedroom, Natasha sees the water rising.
She sees the panic on my face.
She sees the demon closing in.
“I’m coming to save you dadda!” she cries.
*
Her cry dies across the ether like a spirit nine-days dead.
*
The screen flashes and goes blank.
*
It begins with a trickle, like a bathtub overflowing. And then it grows…
*
With the flood rising to my ankles, to my knees, to my waist, I fell into a revery…
I dreamed I had entered the body of a hog…That I was floating in a sea of blood, that I was entering the bloodstream of all animals, of all the world….
I was wallowing in a foul mire…. I dreamed that I was of the mud of the world, that I no longer belonged to humanity…I saw in the form of the rushing sewage the bearing away of human bodies, a conveyor belt of coffins, the grand parade of lifeless packaging. Yet it was very natural…
*
Dateline, Cancún, Mexico: a plague, a storm, a tempest. When the sewage breached the lagoon, delegates from 180 countries drowned, rollicking in their suits, overwhelmed, no, overcome, by the literal shit-storm. Only a handful of delegates emerged: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, and, as if by fate, a raft escaped the flood with a pair of delegates from India and one from the island of Sumatra, Indonesia: the countries, arbitrary though they may appear to be, where the world’s last had rhinos dwelt.
None beside remains.
###