Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  “This,” said Joyce, “is the infinite source of the Tributary. Sources, really, and maybe not truly infinite, but enough to keep us busy for years. The records of American business.”

  “Like accounting records?”

  “That’s one element, maybe the most important one. But also contracts. Lots and lots of contracts. Abstracts of title. Secured transactions. Payroll. HR records. Golden parachutes to unpack. And all the sins covered up in confidential settlements—a whole secret history of America ready to be reassembled and revealed.”

  Donny looked at the piles with new eyes. He looked at the stacks around the desk closest to them, close enough that he could read what they were. Royalty reports on an oil well. A bank loan for the purchase of exploration equipment. A confidentiality agreement between a software company and an investment bank. A severance agreement with a terminated CEO.

  “Where do you get all this?”

  “Some of it was left here. But by your definition, we steal most of it,” said Percy. “By our definition, it’s document production.”

  “That’s what the office raids are about.”

  “Mainly. They are also fun. But the people who did the things documented here are the real thieves. Thieves who keep detailed records of their crimes. Records that go back decades, sometimes centuries, sometimes even farther than that.”

  “Do you really think they’re going to let you all get away with this? Everything is already so broken. What good does this do?”

  “What good does it do to make the living inheritors of a beautiful continent pay for some of the atrocities by which they have profited? Put a stop to their hedonistic orgy in penthouses while people suffer and animals die outside their gated communities? It’s justice, Donny. Real justice. Not your bogus mano a mano adversarial justice, which does no more than codify and perpetuate the old system, all testosterone-fueled taking, I win, you lose. We are setting up a real reckoning this time. A restoration of true equilibrium. True equality.”

  “Economic justice through environmental justice.”

  “Right. It’s not just about liberating labor, or abolishing private property. It’s about creating a system that gives voice to the voiceless. And it’s not just class or race or gender that makes you voiceless. Some don’t have a voice at all.”

  “Not in a language humans can understand.”

  “You understand. Even if you choose to stick to the world you know. That one that gives you your privilege.”

  Donny looked at the army of researchers compiling their reports.

  “You should come back and join us,” said Joyce. Her hand was on his arm. “You helped find this path.”

  “I thought you said I should be shot on sight.”

  “I did, actually. But now I can see you half get it.”

  “Emphasis on half.”

  “At least spend some time here in the archive. You should make sure you know about Heather’s family business before you get up to defend it.”

  “That sounds like a really bad idea.”

  “Who knows,” said Joyce. “Maybe you’ll find something we missed. Something exculpatory.”

  You could see she expected a different outcome. But as smart as she was, she never thought like Donny. He wished he could still believe that gave him an advantage.

  30

  Donny knew a little bit about Heather’s family business, even before they hired him. Everybody did, really, everybody who had been around long enough to know how they had gotten here. But Donny had even read the book—a copy of Helen’s dad’s memoir that Lou gave him when they were still associates at B&E. He could never forget the title: Keepers of the American Flame.

  If you went all the way back, it started as a lumber company in East Texas. That grew into Diboll Timber Harvesters, a diversified wood and paper products company that even managed to go international. Helen’s father, Hank, was the one who’d had the idea to rename the company Promethean Resources, when he wanted to diversify into more scientific applications. He had a good intuition for where the zeitgeist was going.

  Like the Bible, the classics were good sources for people who liked their history ahistorical, or even better, with a favorable spin. The Aeneid became popular a little later, after a new translation that drew out the American ultranationalist themes you didn’t know old Virgil had been so keen on. One of Donny’s early cases had involved a company called Pallantium, named after the mythical new home of the Trojans created when Aeneas planted the flag on Italian soil. Donny had made the point to one of the lawyers involved with that deal that Aeneas and his crew were refugees. The analogy was not well received.

  The Spartans didn’t have an epic poem of their own creation myth. They profited from the empty vessel of enigma, one that exploited the layers of hagiography that had been built by outsiders, from the Athenians who crafted the myth of Thermopylae to the early Americans who named their towns after them. There were Spartas in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Michigan, and a Spartanburg, South Carolina. The Gonzalez battle flag popular with Texan gun nuts, the one with the picture of a cannon that dared the Mexicans to “come and take it,” was one of thousands of American adaptations of the purported battle cry of the 300. Many of which were printed into the morale patches and shoulder flesh of the paladins of American imperium. And a few decades earlier, when the general and his wonks put mercantile trading brigades under the control of military merchant commanders, the idea of Sparta became the namesake of a hundred paramilitary start-ups.

  Hank was part of that generation. When he was younger he had become obsessed with an old Vietnam War movie, 10 Clicks from Laconia, about a group of American soldiers who hold back a Chinese tank invasion with a wall of fire made from a single can of fuel. Being a preppy rich kid, Hank was well educated. But he also came from a long line of DIY Texas tinkerers. He bought himself one of the chemical plants that made napalm, along with most of the outstanding patents. He hired a couple of smart chemists to help him develop the crazy idea he had. And when they had a good beta version, he showed it to the Pentagon.

  One of the generals in the original pitch meeting called it “the neutron bomb of napalm.” But it was better than that.

  Titan Jelly® could burn the forest and leave the wood.

  And when it was time to exterminate the green rebellion that had taken root in Central America, they made the decision to deploy Hank’s new product.

  That was forty years ago. Only now did people really understand what the price had been. The razing of jungles the size of entire countries caused climate change that was already under way to accelerate and morph in ways none of the models anticipated. Across the hemisphere, fertile farm regions became deserts, glaciers melted, rivers dried or overflowed, wildfires raged, storms became more frequent and more intense, and coastal cities drowned.

  In the United States, some of those climate-ravaged regions became the breeding grounds for unrest.

  But it was only when the unrest had erupted into a full-blown rebellion that the federal forces deployed Titan Jelly domestically, to burn the rebels out. It was supposed to be a targeted application on a handful of encampments, but when the fires started they couldn’t be contained, and big swaths of old-growth forest in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia burned. And among the consequences was that the rivers that fed into New Orleans and DC were poisoned—in the case of New Orleans, adding to the poisons that had already been draining out of the heartland for decades.

  Joyce was not the first to make the case that someone should pay for those damages. But she was the first to say the ones who should pay are the ones who really made money from it.

  In a way, it was very similar to what he was trying to do with Slider.

  In another, it was very, very different.

  Slider was one dead kid who lost his parents. Joyce and Percy and their comrades were suing on behalf of forests. He wanted to ask how it was they got their client to sign
up for their program, but he couldn’t afford to spend any more time in the cage.

  31

  Joyce left Donny at a big table with three of the researchers helping Percy prepare her case. Their names were Petra, Lupe, and Dan.

  The idea of sharing files with the people you would be arguing against the next day was weird. To Donny. Obviously not to them. They smiled, welcomed him, and proceeded to show him their whole case, document by document.

  When they were done, he understood why they were so confident.

  They had only fragments of the core elements, but it was enough to know they were right. The work they had done on the ecological damage was extensive. Not quite down to the tree, but close enough. A narrative of the long life of the forests, constructed from a mix of scientific reports, photographs, field notes of anthropologists and explorers, lore of the first peoples of the regions that had been razed, and so on. Stories of the lives of the trees.

  Donny had seen trees that old before. He had been to Oaxaca once, with Joyce, and they visited a village at the heart of which was a tree so big and old that you could not take a picture of it. No lens could capture it. It was like a cross between a redwood and a cypress, taller than a giant of your juvenile imagination, but also drooping, enveloping, a canopy under which you could live. Climb right up in there and return to your simian roots. It was older than Columbus for sure, maybe older than Christ. The more recent arrivals had built their cathedral on one side of it and the town hall on the other, as if to appropriate its magic. At least they knew better than to cut it down for lumber to burn or build.

  Donny remembered being told by his mom that the ranch house they lived in before Dad left was made from old-growth redwoods. It sounded cool at the time. Now that lumber was probably sitting in some South Dallas landfill, after the house was torn down to make room for a builder home.

  Joyce’s team had records in there that you could use to count basically every tree that had been cut. Not its age, but its circumference. The sum of which was a number beyond Donny’s capacity to really visualize, but behind the numbers on paper was an atrocity you could feel in your bones as you sifted the data. An atrocity of a scale far beyond the human injuries to one another that Donny pursued in his own cases.

  It wasn’t that trees could not scream, said Lupe. It was that we don’t have the senses to hear them. Because they are senses that don’t involve that kind of hearing.

  And when you looked at the pictures laid out on the table and considered the entire forest as an interconnected thing, it was hard to argue.

  They didn’t even show him the files on the animals that lived in the forest. They did show him a summary sheet laying out how two-thirds of the wildlife population of the world had been exterminated in his lifetime.

  There was a document in there, an email from a senior executive to his colleagues, reporting from a trip to the field. In it he described what it smelled like there, after the Jelly fire and before the big machines came in and took the trees. Like woodsmoke and oil and charred flesh and a chemical stink that he could taste for weeks after.

  Then there were the documents that traced the money that flowed from the trees.

  Not just to the company. But from the company to its owners. The profits that were realized by those who provided the capital to develop Titan Jelly and everything else the company did.

  “Is this the list?” asked Donny, looking at a sheet with names, addresses, and numbers.

  Lupe nodded.

  “The top thirty current holders of the profits generated by Promethean Resources,” said Petra. “We are working our way down.”

  “So where do I find her?” said Donny, pointing at Heather’s name at the top of the sheet.

  Petra looked at her colleagues.

  “Joyce said it was okay,” said Lupe.

  “Let me see if I can explain how to get there,” said Petra.

  32

  Donny liked to think he knew his way around New Orleans. The years he had a New Orleans office were when the city was occupied, first by the federal troops and then by UN peacekeepers, a period that altered the geography with barricades and checkpoints. The geography had changed again since then, in ways that confounded his ability to navigate. Entire blocks gone back to wild, like the swamp that was the Superdome. Bodies of water allowed to accumulate, breach the banks, submerge the old roads, with creeks that had been buried now uncovered, and creeks that had been paved slowly restored. Vegetation allowed to consume what remained of old buildings already damaged beyond recovery. Green voodoo practiced through a mix of negligence and intention.

  And everywhere he went, people working, and seeming to enjoy it. Or just hanging out. Percy hadn’t been bullshitting: people seemed genuinely happy here.

  Heather, it turned out, was serving a kind of house arrest that allowed her to live as a provisional member of the community. She had offered to be a donor, and a scientist, and a soldier, but for now was working as a member of one of the restoration crews.

  Donny noted the irony of a society that claims to have mostly abandoned private property holding people hostage for funding.

  We may not use money inside these borders, said Petra. But we need it to survive. Until more of the world becomes like us.

  Donny got lost pretty quickly trying to find his way to Bywater, with entire swaths of the old city razed and overgrown with wild foliage. So he found the one landmark he knew they couldn’t change.

  But as it turned out, even the river had changed. The boardwalks were gone, and Mississippi had recovered something closer to its natural condition. The water was sick, but not as sick as it had been, and the banks now hosted tall grasses crowded with green and blue dragonflies. As he walked, one of the big tankers was chugging out toward the Gulf and the open ocean beyond, carrying its load of seeds for planting and refugees for resettlement, many of whom were there on the deck waving their goodbyes to the broken country they would probably never see again.

  Donny wondered what it would be like to do that, to leave. He had passed on one such opportunity, at a time when it was much more attractive. He had thought seeing Joyce would heal the tumors of regret he had nurtured, but it only made them flare up. The hardness in her eyes amplified it, reminding him that his failures as a lawyer and lover had allowed her to undergo the traumas that got her to that place.

  As he walked along the banks, he began to notice little artifacts in the mix of rock and mud at his feet. He stopped to investigate some. The best ended up in his briefcase. A quartz crystal. A shard of pottery with a floral pattern that looked like it could be two hundred years old. A piece of flint that you could tell when you held it had been knapped by human hands, probably thousands of years earlier. A big shell that turned out to be a fossil, the remains of some sea creature that had died millions of years ago. A tooth, the fang of some unknown mammal, still shiny white. He watched the river flow, and thought about what Percy said, about how time works differently there. He could feel it, and feel the freedom in it. But then he thought about what he needed to do. The deadlines that were waiting on him back in the real world. Especially the deadline Thelen had imposed.

  In a proper utopia, they would not let any lawyers in.

  After a while, Donny found his way to where the old Industrial Canal emptied into the river. The canal was the landmark he needed to find Heather, in the area just east of there, which had now morphed into a wide bayou full of wild plants growing along the waterline. The zone on the other side had been a toxic no-go zone since an industrial accident many years earlier, even before the coup. Now it was a farm. Not just for crops, but for plants that clean the air and heal the soil.

  Phytoremediation, Lupe called it.

  The nearest field was a spring garden full of tall grasses and wildflowers. The biggest butterfly garden you have ever seen.

  Beyond that, the prairie got even taller, with acres of leafier grains. All of the plants hybrids, aided in their adaptation to the new
world we had made. Most of them obviously succeeding. Closer to the river shined the solar roofs of the warehouses in which the products of those plants were stored for shipment.

  They had been busier than he could have imagined. No wonder Lecker was worried about his monopoly.

  The old footbridge across the canal was covered in foliage, mostly vines, some of them grown tree-trunk thick as they wrapped around the metal armature. It was only when he stepped onto the bridge and felt the give that he realized the vines had entirely replaced what was there before. The well-trod path was smooth and polished, but still glistening with life, and the rest was clumped with leaves and strands of bright-red flowers. At the end, he could see where the fast-growing trees were rooted at the waterline and then bent over to lean into their role, meeting their cousins with intertwining branches at midway.

  When he stepped off, he found a group of young teachers seated in a meadow with a younger herd of kids. One of the teachers was Heather. And as he walked up to meet them, he knew how the repo man must feel.

  33

  When Maxine Price died, the inheritors of her legacy went through her papers and found more than they expected.

  Maxine Price had been a college professor, a novelist, a radical activist, vice president of the United States for one truncated term, and fugitive convicted in absentia for conspiring in a plot to assassinate the president who succeeded her former boss. Surprisingly, the novelist part was what really stuck, even though what she wrote was mostly what people considered science fiction. Donny had read a couple of the stories when they were assigned by one of his more far-out teachers in college, but they were not his kind of thing.

  Now they had incorporated it into their new gospel.

  It started with the tapes. Old-school cassette tapes, pure analog tech, guaranteed surveillance-proof, a medium Donny could get fully behind even if he was uncertain about the content. Of which there were evidently hundreds of hours. Lectures to the people who would save the future, dangerous propaganda of a seditious radical who would lead the nation to ruin, or the solitary rants of a crazy old lady, depending on your point of view. Donny figured it was some variation of all the above.