Out of Time

by David Klass

  The agents sitting around him, with their strict, almost blind adherence to duty, reminded Tom of his father. When Tom had joined the taskforce, his dad had told him that he would never catch Green Man because he was a green sympathizer himself. After Warren had died, perhaps as a reaction to that last paternal snipe, Tom had tried to push all thoughts of Green Man’s agenda from his mind and dedicated himself to simply catching him. His father’s presence had always made him more determined and competitive but also shortsighted, pushing him to step into a boxing ring or try out for a football team without any thought about if he really wanted that or if it was the wisest thing for him to do. Now, hearing Green Man’s voice speaking to him very directly, Tom couldn’t help wondering if he and the agents around him were blindly and foolishly trying to stop the earth’s last best hope.

  He remembered his wacky sister on the golf course in Boca imploring him not to catch this man who might yet save the planet. Tracy had grown up with Tom and knew him better than anyone, and she had told him that he had to be true to himself. And the truth was that he had been an environmentalist since he was in grade school, and he cared deeply. He had never joined Earth First! or the Earth Liberation Front or any radical organization that promoted violence, but he had belonged to the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and several activist environmental clubs at Stanford and Caltech.

  While Tom hadn’t traveled to the Caribbean reefs that Green Man described, he knew of them. He had been to Australia and seen the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef firsthand—and he understood that the world’s dying coral reefs are environmental canaries in a coal mine, giving the critical warning for ecosystems nearing destruction. He had never been to the Andes, but in the summer after he’d graduated, with two college buddies, Tom had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and stood at the top, not exultant but ashen-faced, looking at the dwindling Furtwängler Glacier that once crowned the summit and would soon be no more.

  “Time’s up,” Brennan snapped. “We’ve got to start making connections and finding smart and specific ways to use this. Any and all suggestions are welcome.” They had had long investigative careers with very different areas of expertise, and Tom was impressed by the analysis they shined—like a spotlight—on these thirty pages. Hannah Lee had picked up almost all the same data points that Tom had noted—she was thorough and razor sharp. For the first time Tom saw in person that Brennan had been right about just how good she was.

  Tom sat listening and occasionally making suggestions while in deep inner turmoil, wanting to help them catch Green Man yet unsure if he should really be caught, doubting the manifesto yet more and more convinced of its authenticity. He had a doc on his laptop with photos of all of Green Man’s victims in the order they had been killed. He clicked to it quickly from the manifesto, and as he glanced at the dozens of young and old faces, his resolve hardened. The arguments and expert suggestions flew wildly around the conference table, and if things weren’t confusing enough, suddenly Brennan had to break off and take a phone call from Carnes at Homeland Security, who demanded to know if the rumors were true and a manifesto from Green Man had been received, and if so, why the hell Brennan hadn’t shared it with any of his sister agencies?

  Brennan didn’t bother to leave the room to answer. In front of his top aides he replied tersely that yes, a document had been received, but it was being validated and under active investigation and would be shared promptly—if it was found authentic—with everyone who could help. Earl and Grant grinned as Brennan told the aggressive DHS officer in barely muted subtext to back the hell off.

  They returned to analyzing the manifesto, but less than ten minutes later, the attorney general herself called, demanding an update and an explanation of why she had been kept in the dark. As politely as he could, Brennan began explaining to her the necessity of restricting access till the document was validated and initially vetted, but she interrupted to inform him that the manifesto had either already been leaked or simultaneously sent out by Green Man to the media, because it was now popping up all over the Internet. In fact, the president himself had just read the first five pages in the Oval Office, and he didn’t appreciate being referred to as a belligerent, bumbling egomaniac with the brains of a cabbage, and he wanted to know what the fuck Brennan was doing about it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  He sat on a bench a hundred feet from the swirl of bodies and loud chants, and he watched the youth rally with a mix of pride and bemusement. They had clearly read his manifesto and taken it to heart. Their signs read “Proud Earth Defender” and “The Cabbage Head Must Roll,” and the angry speech booming out over Columbus Circle via a sound system was about how it was their planet and their generation’s destiny and they must take matters into their own hands. It wasn’t a direct incitement to violence, and the policemen watching the rally on foot and horseback did nothing to stop it or arrest anyone. But it was damn close—a clarion call to action—and Green Man had little doubt who was to blame for their passion, because he spotted several placards with his own supposed image on them, downloaded from the creatively imagined portrait of him on the Internet.

  The young man speaking ended with a chant of “Save the Earth,” shook a fist, and stepped away from the podium. Green Man watched as a tall, young black woman walked to the mic and said, “Hi, everybody, I’m Julie, and I want to talk to you about the great die-off.” The speeches before had been loud and strident but short on facts. Julie spoke softly and stressed the science. She explained how, of the roughly eight million species living on Earth, more than a million were directly threatened by human behavior and were dying off at an accelerating rate. In detailing the chief causes for this die-off, she displayed an impressive command of biology, chemistry, oceanography, and atmospheric science. She wasn’t showing off but building a case, and rather than cheer her on, the audience fell silent and drank it in.

  Green Man watched, mesmerized, remembering Ellen speaking at rallies in Berkeley and San Francisco in the 1990s. Julie’s voice and manner were eerily similar to her mother’s—the understated yet infectious passion, the intellectual depth and easy command of hard science that lifted and transformed a political diatribe into an almost indisputable logical argument, and the charm and charisma that held a fractious crowd captive.

  She ended by getting personal, telling the audience, “Look, I’m not a terrorist. I’m just a high school student, getting ready for midterms. I don’t want to hurt anyone or destroy anything. The most destructive I usually get is a hard foul in a soccer game. I hate public speaking, and giving speeches like this scares me almost as much as the AP Physics test I have to take next week.” There was appreciative laughter from the audience that this charming speaker who had built such a strong and scary scientific argument was now revealing her own normal teenage angst.

  But then Julie finished her speech by switching to the manifesto, and she quoted Green Man’s lines as if she had written them: “But there are causes bigger than ourselves. There are struggles that require us to give up our own identities to take on something larger. We are under attack, and we must defend ourselves. Our lives are under attack. Our future on this earth is under attack. Our unborn children and the generations to come are under attack. And when you are attacked, you can’t just remain passive. You must take action. The time when that action could be limited to peaceful protests and small acts of conservation is past. The Bengal tiger, for all its deadly strength, will soon be gone. The Sumatran elephant, for all its great size, will be a memory. We’re next, and we need to fight back as hard as we can!”

  Green Man heard his own lines coming from his daughter’s lips, and it moved him and exhilarated him in a way he could not have anticipated. The painful days of depression, the endless nights of insomnia, the constant dread of being caught, and the guilt over bringing danger to those he loved all seemed for a moment worthwhile and absolutely necessary. Flushed with this sudden elation and sense of vindication, he
knew what he had to do. He had come just to listen and to see her once before he left forever, but that wasn’t good enough now. She was right: it was time to act rashly, boldly, impulsively, and Green Man stood up off the bench.

  Julie concluded her speech not by shaking her fist but rather with a bow of respect to the crowd, and the applause for her was the loudest of the day. She did several interviews with youth journalists and chatted with other rally leaders, and when the protest broke up, she walked to the bus stop on Sixty-Eighth Street and jumped on an uptown Broadway bus heading home.

  Green Man broke into an effortless fast jog and ran with the bus. The early-evening traffic was heavy, and the bus didn’t make the light on Sixty-Ninth Street and jerked to a stop. Green Man sped on by, passed it by half a block, waited at the next stop at Seventieth Street, and got on.

  Julie was seated at the back, all by herself. She had taken a calculus textbook out of her backpack and was reading with deep concentration. Green Man walked over and sat next to her. He could tell she was aware that a man had sat down next to her while there were empty seats all around, but instead of looking at him or confronting him, she turned her body completely away. She was at an age when she was starting to get hit on all the time, and she chose to ignore him.

  The doors closed, and the bus started uptown. “Hi, Julie,” he said in as quiet and calm a voice as he could manage under the circumstances. The truth was that he had no idea what he was doing on this bus and no notion at all of what he was about to say. All he knew, after hearing her speak, was that he had to see her and talk to her once.

  Julie glanced up, surprised to hear her name from someone she didn’t recognize, and then she stared at him: “I know you. You’re my mom’s boyfriend. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m not your mom’s boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend, hookup, nooner, whatever. I saw you guys together, and it was pretty obvious what was going on. What are you doing on this bus?”

  “I can understand why you think that, but you’re wrong. We’re just very old and dear friends, and we got caught in a cold rain, which is why we were wearing bathrobes. I’m sorry about that. I know the way it looked must have been upsetting. But we’re really just close friends, which actually explains what I’m doing on this bus. I’m here because I want to talk to you about your mom.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you about that,” she said. “Go away.”

  “I will,” he assured her. “Very soon. And I won’t try to talk to you at all if you don’t want or force you to hear anything you might not want to hear. I promise. But I’d ask you to listen for a minute or two. I heard your speech at that rally, and it was tremendously powerful and impressive. I know this sounds a little strange since we just met, but you reminded me of your mom and . . . I couldn’t be more proud of you. . . .” His voice broke, and he fell silent.

  Julie put the calculus book on her lap and glanced quickly around the bus. They were alone in the back, but there were a dozen people in the middle section, including three teens from the rally, and the front was packed, so it clearly felt safe to her as a place to talk to a possibly insane stranger who somehow knew her mother. “Well, that may be intended as a compliment, but it sounds like you were stalking me. And if you really are an old and dear friend of my mom’s, don’t you think I would have met you before?”

  “Nope,” Green Man told her. “Oddly enough, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t explain that. And we only have a minute to talk now. I promise everything I tell you will be true. Your mother is the best person I’ve ever known. And she loves you very much. You mean everything to her.”

  Julie’s face softened despite herself.

  “And I get that you’re at an age where you have questions and she can’t give you the specific answers you want, so you blame her. Please don’t do that. It’s not her fault. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but you should just thank her and feel grateful that you won the mom sweepstakes, because you really did and—”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do or feel. Whoever you are, you’re making me really uncomfortable. I want you to get off this bus now, or I’m going to let the driver know that you’re bothering me, and there’s a police car right on that corner up ahead.”

  “I’m going to get off at Ninety-First Street,” he told her, “and you’ll never see me again.” He almost pleaded, in a soft voice: “So just give me ten more blocks and I’ll be gone for good. Okay?”

  Julie hesitated. “Ten blocks, and they’re short. If you have something to say to me, you’d better say it fast.”

  “You remind me so much of your mother,” Green Man told her, speaking more quickly. “That’s exactly what she would have said. I met her when she was just one year older than you are now, and I saw her speak at rallies, so it was kind of eerie watching you today because you are her spitting image. And as much as she’s accomplished, I think you’re going to accomplish even more.”

  The deep emotion in his voice made Julie turn fully around in her seat to study him. “Who are you?”

  He met her gaze. “Julie, your mom would like to answer all your questions, but she can’t. And what I really wanted to tell you is that you shouldn’t keep asking her things. You’re making her feel incomplete and like she hasn’t been a good mother, and she’s going through a more difficult time right now than you can possibly know, so she needs your unconditional love and support. I know I don’t have the right to ask this, but please just be there for her.”

  “If you care about her so much, why don’t you be there for her?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m going away.”

  “There’s email, right? And telephone calls?”

  “No, there’s no email and no telephone calls. I’ll never speak to her or you again after today. I’ll be dead and buried to her. But I’ll feel better knowing that you’re there for her, and not angry. . . . And, Julie, my ten blocks are up. This is my stop.”

  Green Man wanted to say much more, but a nanny and the two young brats she was supposedly watching were heading up the aisle into the back. The nanny was on her cell, speaking in fast Haitian Creole, and the two brats were swatting each other with plastic swords. The space in the back of the bus was no longer private, and the bus was already slowing for the stop on Ninety-First and Riverside.

  Green Man stood and whispered, “Goodbye, Julie, and may God bless you,” and then he dodged a brat’s plastic sword, walked to the door, and stepped off onto the curb. He stood still, facing out at Riverside Park and the river. He listened to the bus pull away behind him and exhaled. Then a voice said, “Hey, you, wait a minute.”

  He turned and saw Julie standing there as the bus drove away up Riverside Drive. She was a tall and obviously very nervous teenager in jeans and a denim jacket, and she stood awkwardly, with her long arms dangling down at her sides. “You can’t just say those things to me and leave like that.”

  “You’re right,” he acknowledged. “I didn’t plan to talk to you, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was selfish and self-indulgent. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.”

  “But you did,” she said. “So why don’t you have the courage to tell me what you really came to say?” She stepped a little closer. “Before you die or go off to the ends of the earth or erase yourself from the picture or whatever weird thing you have in mind.” Her voice got a little softer as she asked, “Are you dying?”

  “No,” he told her. “That wasn’t meant to be taken literally.”

  “I didn’t think so. Because you look healthy. But I volunteered in a hospice, and the way you talked reminded me of how people there sometimes spoke about dying. So where are you going that you can’t write or email anyone?”

  “To my summer house.”

  “And where is that?”<
br />
  “I can’t tell you.”

  She put her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “Are you always this annoying? It’s hard to believe my mother would put up with it.”

  He didn’t remember either of them starting to walk, but they were both moving along the sidewalk beneath the trees. It was a cool but beautiful late-fall evening, and parents who had come home from long workdays were taking their kids to the park for a precious half hour in the playground before it got too dark.

  They reached the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and Green Man sat on a marble bench. Julie hesitated and sat down a few inches from him. “I don’t mean to be annoying,” he said.

  “But you are.”

  “And I also don’t think we should really be talking.”

  “But you followed me to a rally, and you followed me onto a bus, and now we’re here. Nothing that you say makes any sense. Why can’t you just talk normally?”

  “I wish I could.”

  “So you are capable of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you married?”

  The question was unexpected. He nodded.

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you talk straight to your family?”

  “I try my best.”

  “Do you tell the truth to my mom? She must trust you if you’re really such an old friend and she brought you to our apartment.”

  “Yes, I’ve always told the truth to your mother.”

  “Then try telling it to me. On the bus, when you told me not to ask my mom any more questions, what kind of questions were you talking about?”