The shore path led into a gulch and up the winding slope of Bunker Hill, where Americans had built a bunker to watch for German submarines in the Atlantic, long ago during the Second World War. That’s what Pat Green had told her. Ella darted ahead, while Miranda scrambled over the skittering pebbles, Frank at her heels.
At the summit, there was nothing left of the bunker but a cement slab crumbling under the dazzling sky. Miranda waited for Frank to catch his breath, to take in where he really was. Her world spread out below them, the silvery cove, her little white house with its moss-covered roof on one side and solar panels on the other, the familiar view she loved to paint and sketch. Over there on the far shore a small, thin polar bear had swum to land the previous spring as Miranda watched apprehensively through binoculars. Awesome, she heard Frank whisper. She stared at him. The disruptive stranger, he seemed entranced, and Miranda felt herself pulled out of her own body, allowed to see the world below through Frank’s eyes. The next moment, he’d pulled up the binoculars still dangling around his neck. Again she caught a slip of the black marks, closer now. His tattoo. Possibly it was best to let Frank discover for himself that there was no scientific research station across the cove. Instead she mentioned the polar bear. Which made Frank go taut.
“There are polar bears on this island?”
“Rarely. Only in the spring. They swim ashore from ice floes.”
Then she had to promise him that there really, really were no polar bears on the island now.
“You have to cross your heart.”
She crossed her heart. “Is your father a scientist?” she asked as Frank trained his binoculars on the broken cell tower.
The face he turned on her then was so extraordinary in its mixture of disbelief and rearrangement and private hilarity that Miranda barely knew what to make of it.
“No,” was all Frank said.
Earlier, he’d mentioned his father arriving by plane. As far as Miranda knew, there’d been only the one small plane circling to land the day before. Her father seemed to have spoken to someone arriving on that flight. Did that mean her father knew Frank’s father? This thought was so perplexing, Miranda had to swerve in the other direction, to face Pummelly’s ring of houses spread around its double harbour, like ventricles of a heart, Caleb had said to her once. Beyond the village, UpABack Cove glittered. Beyond that, the island’s rocky shoreline curved out of sight. Frank had dropped the binoculars, following her gaze, and Miranda felt him breathe in and out, as if momentarily letting go of whatever gripped him, allowing the sky above and the water all around to imprint themselves on him.
She led him down the hill’s far side, faster now, where the path wound through mounds of partridgeberries, shiny greenery and red berries scattered among the rocks. While Ella sniffed at a fox’s whitened skull, Miranda stopped to pick some of the roundest, ripest berries, offering the little red globes to Frank. Who was Frank’s father and why was he on Blaze Island? Was she sure she wanted to know? Frank’s mouth exclaimed at the tartness, but the next moment he was crouching to pick more himself, they were both stuffing berries into their mouths, until Frank’s prior urgency to tell her his story overtook him and he stood up.
Farther along the path, the rocks flattened out before tumbling at the shore into more boulders, the land part of an ancient volcano now tipped on its side. Off to the left, over a small pool tucked in a rock dip, rose a handful of bigger boulders. Miranda led Frank this way. Here was a place she sometimes came when she wanted to be truly by herself, hidden by slabs of granite and gabbro yet within easy reach of her house, invisible from the path that led between cove and village, out of reach of anyone who might come in search of her. She leaped over the pool. Their boots made wallowing sounds as they landed. Here they were close to the waves and their smashing spray, the granite wet with it. Finding a seat on the damp, flat surface, boulder at her back, Miranda patted the rock beside her and Frank sat, crossing his ankles, the rips in his jeans revealing crescent slices of bare knee. With a glance at her, he began to speak.
“Let’s get this first part over with. My father. You know Tempus Airlines and Roy Hansen, the man who founded it. The name Hansen, remind you of anything?” There was a bite in his tone that took Miranda aback.
“I don’t know anything about Tempus Airlines. Or Roy Hansen,” she said.
Once more Frank’s face contorted. Miranda had an impression of a thousand faces crossing his quick and mobile face, volatility and disbelief, and then Frank said, “Are you sure?” She couldn’t tell if he was angry or about to laugh.
Embarrassed, Miranda squeezed her hands. She’d brought him to her secret place and now his febrile energy was twisting it. “I don’t fly. I haven’t since I was two, so I don’t really pay attention to airlines. We don’t leave the island. Everything we need is here.”
“Really?”
Actually, she told him, she went fishing, she’d been as far as the Little Fish, pointing to the misted, rocky humps that lay at the horizon, and once out into the bay, so it wasn’t strictly true that she’d never left. Also, he might as well know this now, she didn’t own a cellphone, didn’t want one either, she didn’t live the way other people lived. But the name, Hansen, Hansen, it was rocketing through her, making its own connections —
Frank leaped to his feet. “Okay, I get that, a totally admirable commitment to the local, and the cellphone thing, truly noble — but, like, Roy Hansen, of that band the Echo Men, they were famous — before our time, I guess. Then he goes on to fall in love with flying and, you know, figures out a way to buy one airline, then another. Next thing, he’s this mega celebrity-entrepreneur, an American darling.”
She was putting together the trembling pieces that were there to be put together, even if she’d never heard of this man in her life. “That’s your father? Your father owns an airline company?” If so, didn’t this make Frank’s father the enemy of everything her own father believed in?
Frank’s body seemed to imply that he was waiting for something. A wave shot through him. He swung his arms and bent over with a huff of breath, which made Ella come running from wherever she was. Frank rose up, shaking his head. Laughing? “It’s the most awesome thing that you have no idea who my father is.”
Scrambling to her feet, Miranda barely knew what to say or ask. Again a warning sliver of danger entered her. Danger. Spray leaped in front of them, drops brushing her face. “Why would your father be on Blaze Island?”
“Can we back up a bit?” Frank said. “Can I tell you a little more first? Yes, my father’s this total venture capitalist who makes — steals — obscene amounts of money and people say he only has to touch things for them to turn to gold, though I should add he’s had more than a few business busts in his time. And I really do live with housemates in, like, a co-op in an old house in Somerville, or I did, if it hasn’t floated away.”
His words broke over Miranda as she stared at the flecks of quartz and feldspar winking in the granite. His mother was a famous Japanese American jewellery designer, Naoko Tanaka, Frank said. Naturally Miranda had never heard of her, either. His father had grown up white and half-Irish and poor in Columbus, Ohio. At least one of them, his sister Keiko, had inherited the capitalist gene — Frank got the recessive, activist one. I came into the world this way.
His mother was there in Frank’s face, his cheekbones, his eyes, his black hair. That’s what Miranda was seeing. And the tattoo. Japanese characters on the inner skin of his forearm, even closer now, close enough to touch. Perhaps Frank’s lanky height came from his father. So he had a mother and a father, a sister, and the life he was describing hurtled him a million miles away from her.
“When I was twelve,” Frank said, “they sent me away to boarding school for the first time. I kept getting into trouble because I went around telling all the other kids that capitalism was a form of cancer, unstoppable growth, right, or a brain-wasting disease like BSE, and would kill them, them and their parents, too.
“When I got kicked out of that school, my parents decided to try again. I went along with it because I thought school would be better than living at home, which by then meant their palace of a Manhattan apartment, not that either of them was there much, they’re always taking off in some private jet for one of their many houses — or a beach or someone’s yacht. Just being in that apartment made me feel complicit in, like, everything. Me, half the time alone in this humongous space. They didn’t want to leave me there either because they were frightened I’d start giving things away. So, this time, back at school, I started organizing rallies for basic income and tax-the-rich policies. It was in the middle of the Great Recession.
“That’s when I met Colson Barnett, this brilliant philosophy teacher and poet who grew up black and poor in Detroit, and through some twist of fate ended up teaching kids like me, nurturing the closet and not-so-closet anarcho-Marxist nihilists. Colson decided to take me under his wing, so to speak. Birding is a thing Colson loves. He said it’s hard to be angry when you’re out in the woods even though the birds are vanishing and birders who look like him are a rarer breed than that. Because I admired Colson so much for being nothing like my father, I went along with him, forest bathing and birdwatching in the woods of New Hampshire. That’s how I know what I know about birds.”
When Frank’s jacket brushed Miranda’s arm, a dart sped through her.
“Anyway, to speed everything up, a few months ago, I received a letter, an actual letter in the mail, addressed to me, handwritten, which made it possibly creepy but so unusual I had to open it. I get kooky stuff sent to me sometimes, people trying to reach my dad, like fan letters, even hate mail.”
Frank kept glancing across intently, as if while spilling all these things he was simultaneously trying hard to take her in, too. “Miranda, do you know what solar geoengineering is? Solar radiation management, does that mean anything to you?”
On the edge of the flat rocks, by the little pool, Ella gave a bark. Of warning? They weren’t hidden standing where they were, as they would have been if seated, tucked against the boulders. Anyone coming up over Lighthouse Hill from town would be able to spot their two figures among the red rocks. One distant figure, then another rose above the crest of the hill, two women, one tall with a flood of hair.
“I’ll be right back,” Miranda said, breath loud in her ears. Ella had gone running towards the women. The tall one, Sylvia, turned and retreated out of sight, leaving Christine Brett, in slacks and windbreaker, to continue down the near side of the hill with sturdy purpose, making her way along the winding path until she was close enough to call, “Miranda, do you know where Caleb’s at? We’ve not seen him since this morning. He was supposed to bring a can of gasoline back for us.”
“He’s running an errand for my father,” Miranda shouted, reddening. The wind boxed her ears. She felt Christine take in Frank’s presence, wherever he was behind her. Frank’s attention was a new skin all over her. The next moment, as if reading her mind, Christine was asking if that was the American who’d driven into the flood, and Miranda called back yes. She almost stumbled on the rocks under her feet, the sense of worlds colliding was so intense.
A look of concern crossed Frank’s face when she returned. “Are you all right?”
“Let’s move off a ways.”
He followed her back up the slope to a flat place below the summit of Bunker Hill. Down in the cove there was, as yet, no sign of her father’s quad. Across the cove rose the emphatic presence of Cape House. Miranda touched the rock beneath her to make sure it was still there.
“One other thing you need to know is my father has set up this foundation to fund research into tech innovations like alternative airline fuels and carbon sequestration plants.” Frank hugged his chest as they halted. “Things that make it look like he cares deeply about the problem of the climate, about greenhouse gas build-up, which is completely hypocritical, given all the emissions spewing from his planes — and his desire to launch a mission to Mars, I kid you not. He’s got a wing of his foundation devoted to that, too. Basically he’s this carbon pirate and he won’t stop, he wants to keep expanding.”
Somehow they were back on top of Bunker Hill. There was fervour and vulnerability in Frank’s stance along with an acerbic twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Miranda? Do you want me to stop talking? You have a peculiar expression on your face. It’s truly not my intention to disturb your beautiful life.”
Everything came at her acutely, shifts of moisture and air pressure as the air touched Frank’s face, the way he spoke her father’s forbidden word climate, all these new and uncontrollable feelings.
It was as if she’d been living in a bubble. It was a beautiful bubble, yes, a bubble that she and her father had created. Frank was outside it, punching at its membrane with his words. Moments before, he’d told her how, at college, he left his freshmen dorm one day to join the occupy movement in New York, protesting and living in a tent for weeks, before running off to do the same in London. He could fly for free and he’d taken advantage of this — for only the best reasons, Miranda — adding his body and voice to protests in Rio and Lima, protests against the capitalist barons who ruled the world, who believed in infinite growth and would gouge every corner of the Earth to attain it, who kept all the money for themselves leaving wreckage for everyone else, which meant of course his father. As he spoke, Miranda pictured this: the barons, crowds of protesting people, Frank with a knapsack over his back, wearing his ratty sweater, racing from place to place to be with so many others. Had the other protesters known who his father was, she asked. Some did, Frank said, some didn’t.
She’d heard vaguely of the things that Frank described but she’d allowed the outer world to fall away because it had torn a life from her and it felt good to let it go. The exhilaration, the hope in those crowds, it was like a drug, Frank said. He’d been arrested in London and tear-gassed in Hong Kong. His father, disgusted, had cut off contact with him for months. In the past year, he’d stopped flying, mostly — Miranda, I swear — and was working for a local co-op in Boston, whose workers were fighting to reclaim their factory, which had made plastic takeout dishes; they wanted to retool it to make compostable or even edible ones. It was as if, while offering this account of himself, Frank was trying to hold his long limbs together, to stop them from flying off. There was a pain in him that Miranda couldn’t place or reach.
She ought to tell him that the world she knew was nothing like this and had more than people in it: wind and trees and plants, she was someone who spoke to plants and considered trees her kin. In retreat you could make your own life. Escape some of the world’s horrors. Frank was a disturber. This was what he did. He was full of indignation. And yet: Miranda felt like a curious fawn at the edge of the widest clearing.
On top of Bunker Hill, Frank stood without speaking.
“Just tell me what you want to tell me,” Miranda said.
She had to step close to hear him say, “Are you sure?” Close enough for him to see her nod.
The touch he gave her then was no doubt meant as reassurance, yet it sent a ricochet of dizziness through her.
“What was in the letter?” Miranda asked, her voice so breathless she had to repeat the words.
This time Frank was the one who first stepped onto the path. “It was sent to me by someone named Anouk Sand. I didn’t know if that was a man’s name or a woman’s. What the letter said was that my father, through his innovation fund, has plans to back this private company involved in solar radiation management research.”
“What does that mean?” Miranda heard herself ask as the echo of other overheard words streamed through her.
“You spray tons of particulate matter up into the stratosphere, most likely from jets, so all the little particles create a haze, which wraps the Earth. The sun’s rays bounce off the particles and are reflected back into space. Supposedly this prevents temperatures from rising so fast. Kind of like what
happens with a volcano, when it spews volcanic dust and the dust forms a cloud that stays in the atmosphere for years, and makes temperatures drop. Except the atmosphere is extremely unpredictable, so there’s a big risk, say, if you spray sulfur particles, of increasing the hole in the ozone layer and generally disturbing weather patterns even more, causing more floods and droughts, especially, like, in equatorial regions, or messing with major ocean currents. But it’s alluring because the technology’s basically there, and the weather, well it’s pretty hard to disagree with the fact that it’s growing wilder all the time.
“Any experiments in the field, even small ones, are highly contested, since there’s only one atmosphere, and what happens if things mess up? Because, all things considered, the technology’s fairly easy to implement, there’s actually not much to stop rogue nations, or some private dude with a ton of money, from deciding, Hey, I’m going to do something about all this crazy weather. I’m sure you can see where I’m going, like it’s totally the kind of thing my father would be jonesing for. Specialized jets to carry the stuff into space, thousands of flights a year for years? Which is what people are talking about. Oh my God, he’d want to believe it’s our salvation. And he’d want to be the one bringing it about.”
They’d reached the gulch, where the water sucked in and out with ferocity and residual storm force, hollowing out the old rock into a great, round bowl as it had done for eons before humans had been around to see it, and likely would for eons more. It was possible to stand for a moment staring into its depths and wonder anxiously, without saying anything at all, what the future might bring. Frank fell silent. There was heat inside Miranda, pressure building up behind her ribs.
Why would her father have anything to do with a man like Frank’s father? With a plan like what Frank had just described? Had she ever heard him discuss anything of this nature? Jets? Frank’s father doing the spraying? One night only months before, leaning over her in bed, her father had kissed her forehead and whispered strange words. I do nothing but in care of thee. How far would he go in his experiments? What did it mean for the life to come if even here she wasn’t safe?
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