Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  He moved on. “Okay, let’s drill into the music you’ve just heard. It’s by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks.” Stefan wrote his name on the white board and continued. “Vasks was born in Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1946. He studied and composed through the dreadful post-war Soviet years and, since 1991, has been a significant influence in the resurgence of classical music, which has always been an element of Latvian identity. Were Vasks with us now, which would be possible as he’s still very much alive, I think he would be interested in our study of panarchy. Here, let me show you what he has said about his compositions.” Stefan projected an image, and asked Sean to read from the slide:

  Stefan thanked Sean and reiterated the phrase, “ … we are balanced on the edge of time’s end. It’s frighteningly close.” He asked, “Can you sense that in his music?”

  Katherine appeared to have something to say. Stefan pondered her misty eyes with a tad of gloominess in his own. He tilted his head upward slightly, arching his eyebrows. “This music just melted me, Stefan. Honestly … Sorry!” Katherine dabbed her eyes. “Let me try to be less emotional. Sorry. Yes, in the throbbing percussion, I can feel the end of time looming. But then in those notes, by a bassoon, I think, and in the strings, piano, and chimes, I can sense the potential for humanity to overcome its inclination to annihilate itself, to paraphrase him. Could Vasks be thinking of backing away from the Late-K cliff or perhaps of the progression from omega to alpha? I don’t know. My God, this panarchy model whipsaws me between utter despair and, as Vasks was trying to accomplish, lunging for hope.”

  Stefan let her words dangle out there, swaying back and forth like an empty swing in the wind. He called on Sean.

  With equal fervor, Sean said, “I too can’t help but frame almost all the narratives in my piddling little life as parts of the adaptive cycle. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What am I thinking? Am I going nuts, or what?’ I guess I’m not alone. Even Vasks seems to imply knowledge of the cycle. When it comes to classical music, I admit to being an ignoramus. But I’ll have to say this piece moved me as well. You can sense the passion of this man, his wounds, his heart. I’d just love to meet him.”

  “This ain’t my kind of music for sure,” José said “but I do have a lot of questions about this model. Jus’ like everybody else, it’s beginning to seriously mess with my brain.”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute,” Stefan reassured him.

  Michelle, the athlete who launched the f-bomb a couple of weeks earlier, agreed. “My brain’s messed up too. I’m walking around campus, like, wondering whether this or that is a threshold that will take us over the cliff. I looked at this truck the other day delivering chips and nachos to Newman and Noggs cafeterias. I’m thinking, what if gasoline refineries are hit by a super storm? No nachos in Newman-Noggs. Snackavores in crisis, can’t study for the big exam, they all fail the test, skew the curve. Professor flunks half the class. Kids get kicked out of school. Stupid example. But see how this model can make you crazy? Then I thought, wait a minute, who needs junk food in a collapsing world?”

  “Yeah, who needs most of the shit of our lives with the world going psychotic. Lots of paradoxes. Gotta be able to keep opposing and scary thoughts from busting your brain wide open,” Astrid advised. This made me wonder why I didn’t have such adult insights back then. Astrid must have somehow skipped adolescence.

  “Back to the music,” Stefan pleaded.

  Putting aside thoughts about Astrid’s maturation, I risked an opinion. “To be truthful, Stefan, I’m also no fan of classical music. But this piece is so, what? — austere and piercing. It seems to bring out both. How did he put it? Our place at the brink, ‘one step away from extinction’ is what he said, as well as the gloom. But it also conveys something almost kid-like and optimistic: that lilting refrain you hear several times.”

  Lucia, the only Latina in our class, usually a silent soul, chipped in that morning. “The music, I don’t know, it just seemed so flowing, so minimalist and sensual. I really liked it. But now I find my mood a bit dark. I am a displaced Mexican who lives in Milwaukee, as I told everyone on the first day of class. This is like me hearing Mariachi from my childhood and both good and bad memories come back, you know, whether I invite them to or not.”

  “I understand. My experience is similar.” Stefan said, his sincerity oozing all over the place. “This is exactly why I brought Vasks to you. I thought that his music would speak in ways that words sometimes cannot. My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Latvia so this piece evokes something primal and complicated for me, like Lucia, as though it is boring right into my blood and bones. When I listen to Vasks, I am transported to Riga, the Latvian capital, to its historic city center going back to the days of the Hanseatic League in the twelfth century, to the Daugava River, flowers in Livu square, the solemnity of my parents when they recall their tortured past there — literally torture in my father’s case; the embraces of uncles and aunts, even the grotesque Soviet-era apartment blocks. All these, and something much deeper, stir me as I listen to this symphony, which, by the way, Vasks dedicated to the beauty and harmony of the Earth.”

  “Have you been to Latvia many times?” Em asked. “Do you speak the language?”

  “No and yes. I went to Latvia with my parents when I was sixteen and last year I stopped there for a few days on my way back from East Africa. I am obviously romanticizing to some degree about the country, but hopefully not the deeper feelings. I speak classical Latvian poorly. Cuss words, much better. I learned them early from my dad.”

  “That’s amazing — you being a first generation American like me,” Lucia told Stefan. “If the reasons we ended up here in America are the same, then you might say that Late-K circumstances drove our parents away from their home country. In my case, it had to do with the drug wars. What about yours?”

  “Yes, similar. My parents were escaping post-Stalin persecution of ethnic Latvians. By the time I came along in 1981, they had become American citizens.”

  “Awesome!” chirped Samantha. “To get back to your hesitancy about romanticizing your Latvian experience: Is that bad?”

  Stefan thought a moment before replying to Sam’s question. “No, I don’t think romanticizing memories of place is bad. In fact, it is deeply human. Our attachment to place, our sense of place, our stories and perceptions of places significant to us, all these, draw upon the heart as much as the brain.”

  “A tryst between the science of place and the romance of place,” Astrid said. Stefan paused to let Astrid’s words spill softly across the rows, over our scattered papers and books, our notebooks and laptops, across our hoodie-draped chairs, and into the corners of the drearily appointed room now pulsing with emotional intensity, perhaps surpassing in integrity and beauty the finest concert hall in the halcyon days of nineteenth century Riga. How grandiose! My memory of how this all came down is arguably tainted with my own sentimentality about that semester and our venerable mentor. No apologies. Looking back, I confess that I fervently long to recapture at least a tad of my sophomoric idealism.

  From there, Stefan led us into the tectonic zone known as Late-K where every event, every human decision, seems to lead us closer to the brink, as Kate Nickleby fully understood. Sure, ‘natural’ ecological systems like Nick’s spruce forest and Nickleby’s tropical rainforest, do occasionally find themselves in Late-K. They either partially crash or evolve beyond the risk, unless, of course, something like a giant meteorite smashes everything to smithereens. But humans and socio-ecological systems are quite another matter — the Brights Groves, the Soviet Unions, the southwestern deserts. And since the Earth is almost fully covered with such systems, Late-K becomes one scary prospect, one that does seriously fuck with one’s brains. No doubt that. Sean, with Stefan’s approval, presented us stunning research that birthed two further classes of debate and discussion about the challenge of identifying and understanding the alarm bells of Late-K and the many examples in those days leading us, unbe
knownst, toward pandemonium.

  “Okay, my paper is on avian influenza — bird flu,” Sean began. “This is not a small story, by any means. My study question was: Could a microbe, a virus of the biological kind, drive humanity over the cliff? Well, the short answer is: yes. A Nobel Prize-winning biologist called Joshua Lederberg recently wrote that ‘the single biggest threat to man’s continuous dominance on the planet is the virus’.vi Here he was not referring to computer viruses, though the same could be said of malware, I believe. Anyway, when I saw Lederberg’s words, I knew I had found my life’s work. As I’ve mentioned, I am a med school dropout now working toward a PhD in microbiology.”

  “The truth is our methods of preparing vaccines to combat viral outbreaks are still so primitive and slow that a flu virus doesn’t need to kill one-hundred percent of its victims to really disrupt society. If it spreads so quickly that a vaccine cannot be developed, a flu virus could kill half or even sixty percent of its victims, and result in hundreds of millions of additional human deaths, and cripple all the systems we depend upon. The few bird flu outbreaks that so far have not reached such epic proportions have convinced scientists and health officials that the bird flu family of viruses, which can pass from pigs to chickens and other birds and rapidly mutate, could evolve into a killer that would infect much of humanity. With virtually every place on the planet less than forty-eight hours by plane from every other place, a superviral form of the bird flu could spread worldwide in a matter of days.”

  Sean paused to look around the room. He saw no glee in his classmates’ eyes, including mine.

  “Alright, consider this example,” he continued. “In 1983, just one tiny genetic switch involving a single protein in one type of bird flu led to the deaths of millions of commercially raised chickens in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. Instead of a mild virus slightly setting back egg production, that genetic switch turned what had previously been a non-lethal flu into a dangerous pathogen. The organs of all infected chickens melted into black goo.”

  “Ewww,” barfed Samantha.

  “Yeah, seriously. With no vaccine, the authorities had no choice but to destroy the remaining uninfected populations of chickens in three states. That crude response avoided further spread and the crisis passed.”

  “There’s no way we could control a human virus that way,” Greg, the Greek American, asserted.

  “That’s for sure. We’d be forced to scramble to develop vaccines while thousands are dying. Here’s an example of one that almost became a disaster for humans. In the late nineties and early 2000s, one strain of this same bird flu, H5N1, which had been present for a long time in Asian farm fowl populations, began claiming human lives in Hong Kong and southern China. Since 1997, when it first emerged, it has infected 846 people. Of these, more than half have died. Most of those people caught the flu from chickens but the first cases of human-to-human transmission were recorded in 2005. That captured the attention of the world’s virologists. They were concerned that this virus could become pandemic. We had no vaccine for such an event and we could not have manufactured enough to respond to even normal rates of infection.”

  “Why have I not heard of this? What happened?” blurted Michelle.

  “Good questions,” Sean replied. “I was in high school in 2005 and I must admit I had no clue about how close we came to a pandemic. To answer your question, it turned out that the virus was confined to a small region in southern China and it never broke out from there. There was a similar scare with a strain of H1N1 in 2009, which did spread beyond Asia but turned out to be minimally pathogenic by the time it got to Mexico and the U.S. Had this flu been as virulent as the earlier one, it could have killed something like 375 million people worldwide. Can you imagine: more than five percent of humanity gone in a matter of months?”

  “Merde alors!” Em said under her breath.

  “No kidding,” Sean replied. “This is why I said that with much less than one-hundred percent infection and fatality rates, downstream impacts would cripple our entire way of life, at least temporarily. Even if you yourself had not been infected, all the systems you depend upon would have been impaired: no university classes; little or no gas for transportation of critical goods; at best, meager supplies of food in supermarkets; no coal, oil, or natural gas for power plants — thus spastic supplies of electricity, server farms shut down, the Internet blinking out, cell towers and phones dead. There wouldn’t be enough vaccines or medicines for health care workers, who would die at rates higher than the general population. And on and on. While the National Guard is burying the dead in mass graves, Late-K proceeds to omega in a flash. Sorry about that last image. I lifted it from a book on pandemics. So here is a classic example of command and control systems totally incapable of responding to a Late-K event, too little redundancy in our public health systems, and declining novelty in that we are stuck in a twentieth century mode of fashioning vaccines. The drug makers, also way too concentrated in a few big firms — what we refer to as ‘Big Pharma’, detect no market signals for vaccines for unheralded viruses.”

  Em stared blankly at Sean. “Une experience horrible,” she said.

  “No doubt,” Sean agreed. “To wrap up, I would say that the risk of a pandemic like the one we dodged in 2009 is at least as high now because we are as poorly prepared as we were then. Also, ‘our ignorance of our ignorance’ in both virology and public health is an example, I think, of an ingenuity gap — the difference between our need for solutions and our ability to provide them. The ‘greatest of follies’ in this case, to use Rachel Carson’s words, is that the risk of a pandemic seems to come as a surprise to almost everyone — ordinary people, politicians, the media — almost everybody but virologists and some public health experts.”

  With nothing more to say, Sean fastidiously gathered his notes and quietly returned to his seat, his freckly hands folded in his lap. He cranked his neck around to see the rest of us in a stupor.

  Finally, Melissa said mournfully, “Talk about ending class on an uplifting note.”

  “Well, I warned you,” Stefan replied.

  Since I was scheduled to work after class in the CNRD office, I walked down the hall with Stefan. He said that a class concluding so direly magnified his own desolation about the Late-K circumstances of the world. And yet, he also said, “Without reason or logic, at the end of the day, my own sense of hope refuses to let that gremlin of despair cripple me.”

  FOUR

  Stefan’s Journal

  Breaking Code

  Those who don’t feel this love

  pulling them like a river,

  Those who don’t drink dawn

  like a cup of spring water

  or take in sunset

  like supper,

  Those who don’t want to change,

  let them sleep.

  — Rumivii

  1

  A TENTATIVE KNOCK ON MY OFFICE DOOR, as I swivel round to face Katherine Bridgeston. Slightly older than other graduate students in her cohort, Katherine seems to have been schooled by the real world: the crab circle drabness of demeaning work in cramped cubicles, grimy walkups with exorbitant rents, loveless nights, taxes, and the like. At that time, nothing but speculation on my part, of course. I smile at the tall, open-faced woman in the doorway.

  “Sorry for being late. I over-slept my alarm,” she confesses.

  “A likely story.”

  “It’s the truth, Stefan. It’s what happens when one is over her head writing a paper for ecology in the wee hours.”

  I notice the heat in her cheeks. She diverts her eyes. “No worries, Katherine. Punctuality is not one of my obsessions. See, no clocks anywhere. No watch either.”

  “Are you some kind of throwback?”

  “In some ways I am a throwback. In others, I qualify as a systems wonk.”

  She places a tiny digital recorder on my desk. “You okay with me recording?”

  “Sure, but you’re not going to upload it
anyplace are you?”

  “Nope.” I note a peevish grin. “This conversation is just between us.” She pauses and flushes again, maybe at the brashness of her coquetry, hovering over my desk like a swallowtail. Her caramel eyes are alert and glimmering. I can’t help being drawn to them. I imagine that they could become a home for my own. Her beauty, not exactly perfection, surprises me up close. The individual elements are mighty pleasing: shimmering hair and the way it dances across her shoulder and round her long neck, her natural linen skin, her lips, fuller now than I remembered in class, an intriguingly proportioned torso, great hands. An enigma: how the sum of all renders me motionless. I abruptly lower my eyes. I ponder her self-assurance — a quiet confidence both overt and somehow sheltered. Despite my inclination to keep fantasies at bay, my imagination fires up. Maybe we could get something going. Settle down and raise some beautiful kids with delicate faces and bodies like hers. We’d live on a farm outside of town, do a big vegetable garden, milk some goats, have cats, a couple of horses, go contra dancing Saturday nights. Whoa! She’s my student.

  “Okay,” she says, adjusting the recorder. “Professor Mansfield told us that this interview is meant to garner deeper background on the education and expertise of a faculty member in our school. Deeper, that is, than that you can get from a prof’s website. I chose you, lucky man.” She looks up and I note something mischievous there, followed by a tiny throat clearance.

  “Lucky I am.”

  “After the interview, we’re to write a 1000-word paper as if it were an article for The New York Times Magazine or for Slate dot com.”

  “Sounds like fun.”