Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  “I’m not dead,” said Frank in a squeaky voice that he struggled to break free of. “It was a long drive, I almost drowned at the end, but I’m here.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you fly in with us?”

  “I didn’t want to come with you, I want to stop you.” Frank’s voice gained strength as Miranda sent all her breath towards him.

  “Stop us from what?” Kindness had entered Roy, or guile, his smile giving off brilliant flashes that seemed determined to seduce them all. “You don’t even know why I’m here.”

  He had tucked Frank close to his shoulder — was the gentleness real? When Miranda tried to catch Frank’s eye, he seemed far off, caught in a struggle. Was it love that turned his father into a fierce and gaping mouth, a mouth that wanted to swallow Frank whole, because Frank was his and there to be possessed?

  “So why don’t you tell me?” Frank said, just as new footsteps thundered onto the bridge and shouts burst outside the door at Miranda’s back.

  Anna’s voice — and Caleb’s? Miranda had no sooner hauled barking Ella into the corner where the propane camping stove and kitchen cupboards were than the door swung open again.

  “That’s the end of all experiments, all right?” Caleb cried. “No more spraying anything on this island.”

  The odour of gasoline, already strong in the room, grew stronger, the smell pouring from Caleb’s dirty coveralls, which must, for some reason, be saturated with it. There were spruce needles in his hair and crease marks on his cheeks, and at his arrival, as if this time taken by surprise, Alan leaped to his feet.

  “I want you off my island.” Caleb’s gaze veered into Miranda’s and kept moving. There was something shocking about the ease with which he passed her by in order to concentrate on the men, as if, amid all this cacophony and chaos, he had become unreal to her, and she to him, and this made her shiver.

  The knock was as startling as any other intrusion. Equally startling was Caleb turning to open the door. Agnes Watson, watchful and determined and not seen by Miranda since that early spring visit when she’d carved up a seal at shore, stood on the threshold with Anna Turi.

  “Agnes, you’re here.” Alan’s face lit up with joy. “I was really beginning to worry what had happened to you.”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Agnes said, wiping her forehead with one arm, though her own response was more muted than his.

  “Did one of you release him?”

  “I did,” Agnes said. “You think I was going to leave him tied up like that?”

  “It was temporary, to allow us to get some work done here.”

  “Not a good idea, Alan,” said Agnes. There were strips of what looked like ripped sheet dangling from her jacket pockets. “Why shouldn’t he hear what you have to say?”

  Caleb’s face quickened.

  “Absolutely,” said Alan, whose own expression remained inscrutable to Miranda as he took in the rebuke of Agnes’s words, “as long as you promise, Caleb, not to disrupt things.”

  “I’ll give you a few moments,” Caleb said gruffly, and when he ducked his head, Miranda recalled the gesture from the long-ago night when they’d first met. Caleb had been a boy then. Now he moved with the energy of one sensing his possible authority.

  “Why don’t you all find a seat?” Alan said. “It’s a bit cramped in here but we ought to be able to make this work.”

  There was enough light coming in around the curtains for them to see each other. Miranda tugged open the curtain above the sink but didn’t turn on the overhead light, while at her side, Ella’s nose kept working, taking in the barrage of scents along with the painful stink of gasoline. The room was thick with odours of human sweat, an undernote of damp, the wood stove unlit. Anna and Agnes settled together on the daybed on the far side of the room, Anna touching Agnes’s shoulder, their clothes releasing trace notes of spruce and blackberry and outdoor air. Frank’s father returned to his seat as Frank, with a glance at Miranda, dragged her father’s desk chair from the corner of the room where her father’s desk bulked in the shadows, along with its four darkened monitors and the metal blocks of all his data-filled hard drives.

  “Caleb?” said Alan.

  “I’ll stand,” said Caleb from the doorway.

  “We’re in the middle of a private meeting.” The man in the red nylon jacket spoke plaintively from the near end of the table. His sulky gaze and twitchy lips radiated hostility. He must, Miranda realized, be Frank’s uncle. “Can you not ask all these interlopers to leave?”

  “Actually I can’t,” said Alan. “Things haven’t gone as planned, but here’s where we find ourselves, apart from my collaborator who remains trapped in Boston, but isn’t this how it goes, these days, that we’re relentlessly called upon to respond to the new unpredictabilities.”

  Had her father expected that she and Frank would find their way here, Miranda wondered, and find their way here together? Surely he hadn’t planned for Caleb’s sudden, dramatic entry.

  As the man wearing glasses muttered something, Alan introduced Anna and Agnes as his colleagues: Anna Turi, climate modeller from Vaeroy Island by way of Norwich, England, Agnes Watson, geographer and climatologist, formerly of Ottawa, now back in Nain, Nunatsiavut, and could they spare a moment to hope that Arun Mudalnayake, Sri Lankan cloud physicist and nanoengineer, trapped in his Cambridge lab by Hurricane Fernand, was safe.

  Agnes’s face remained uneasy. Frank’s uncle noted that others were also trapped. Alan nodded, fixing on him intently, and said indeed they were.

  Her father had his own stealthy power, Miranda thought as she crouched on the floor by the stove. Somehow they’d all arrived here and he was surveying them not only across a small room but a vastness of many, moving landscapes. He was out on a sea of shifting and colliding ice pans, trying to keep his balance while leaping across the pans as if his life and so much more depended on it. She felt the shifting deep inside. He did not seem in control of anything, and this lack of control was reassuring, despite all that hung in the balance, accompanied as it was by his keen vigilance. Alan touched his lips. He stood and paced, running a hand through his greying beard.

  “I could show you maps, graphs, some modelling data, data from our proto-experiments, but instead I’d like you all to imagine something,” he said, at which Roy made a peculiar sound.

  “Air. Water vapour condensing around billions of tiny particles to form clouds, which never stop moving and reforming. We model using sets of equations to represent sections of hundreds of kilometres of the Earth’s atmosphere and supercomputers evolve the grids forward in time. But real clouds are usually no more than a kilometre or two, and volatile, wisps of vapour and particles, some existing for no more than moments. It’s extremely difficult to capture with any degree of accuracy in a computational model what clouds really are.

  “Over the years, Anna and I have run models attempting to determine possible kinds and sizes of particle we might introduce into the atmosphere and the possible reflective haze that might result, how the particulates might behave up there, up among the high cirrus clouds. We have to consider clouds in all our climate models, high clouds and low. They’re extremely hard to model because simultaneously large and small, and climate change itself is shifting the atmospheric patterns. The complexity of clouds — it’s one of our biggest unknowns. It’s not actually all that difficult to shoot particulates into the stratosphere, but to create a uniform global reflective coverage and sustain it? Even regionally — there’s a huge amount of research still to be done. Is it possible to create coverage that has some beneficial effect on the snow pack, not to mention the world’s whole weather system? Is it possible to do so without causing irreparable harm? In the air and on the ground? Who would ensure the safety of such a program and how? I can’t tell you with any certainty at all. We’re very, very far away from knowing this.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Roy. “You brought us all the way here to tell us you can’t do something?”

 
“I invited you here as part of an experiment.”

  “To invest in a promising research and development project,” said Roy.

  “Roy, let me ask you a question. Why did you come?”

  With an exhalation of impatience, Roy said, “Out of a desire to support evolving technologies, which will help us create a more robust and sustainable future. And tackle the carbon problem. I’m doing you a favour —”

  “Me a favour, Roy?”

  “I’m willing to offer you considerable financial backing —”

  “We are willing —” Frank’s uncle attempted to say in a smaller voice, which Miranda’s father interrupted.

  “You would be doing this for me? I hardly think so. And what I, what we, proposed to you won’t tackle the carbon problem, only bandage it. The gases will go on accumulating, which all the studies we provided to you make clear. If we do something like this, it’s got to be alongside robust decarbonization and carbon sequestration. Or else — what if the spraying ended suddenly, for who knows what reason, and there’s nothing to protect us from all the still-soaring emissions waiting for us in the atmosphere? Our past, the past still hanging there up above us. In any case, do you really think the best way to proceed with something so risky and of such global import is via a small cabal of us, holed up in a cabin on a remote and windswept island?”

  “We’ve put up with a hell of a lot of capriciousness to end up in this shack, which is not, I can assure you, what we thought we were coming to. If you wanna talk about being misled —”

  “I invited you to see if you’d come. As I said, that was part of the experiment — it became the core of the experiment. And you came, Roy, you and Leonard and Tony. Not even a hurricane on the scale of Fernand was going to stop you, even as it went on hammering the seaboard, smashing cities, infrastructure, airports one by one. Possibly it made you more eager to come, am I right? Possibly it amplified your perception of the need to do something about our precarious predicament, which is only getting worse. Roy and Leonard, you even signed what Tony McIntosh called my worthless preamble, because there’s something you want here, isn’t there? Anna, can you —”

  How did it happen that Anna came to be holding the electronic pad, which Frank’s uncle Leonard had been clutching? He must have set it down and quick-fingered Anna, having picked it up, passed the pad to Alan, who, squinting, held it out far enough to read without his reading glasses. “We confirm the evidence for human activities raising the temperature at the Earth’s surface has reached a ‘five-sigma’ level of certainty, that is to say a probability of ‘virtually certain,’ or 99.999 per cent. That’s scientific language for there’s no room for equivocation. None. Perhaps the wording sounds a bit fussy, since we’ve known this for years, yet it remains surprisingly difficult to get people to confirm it or act like it’s true. Why do you think that is, Roy?”

  Leaving his perch, Frank approached Alan and said, “Can I see that?”

  When Alan handed him the pad, Frank stared at it. As if he didn’t know what to do next, he stuffed the pad under his sweater, tucked into the waist of his jeans. With an amused smile Alan let him. Frank’s father sat playing with a gold fountain pen, as if not looking at Frank were a way to dismiss him and turn him into a prankster. “Uncle Len,” said Frank, “how about passing over that piece of paper I saw you fold up and put in your jacket pocket?”

  “Oh, give it to him, Len,” said Roy. “It’s just a piece of paper. The digital file can be demolished and the signed hard copy can be ripped to pieces when we get it back.”

  “If you get it back,” said Frank. “But, Dad, why would you want to destroy it? Really it would be more of a start if you acknowledged the extent of your own contribution to the destruction of the world as we know it. What do you think about that?”

  “Roy, listen,” said Alan. “What if I now reveal our aerosol intervention may work after all, there’s real promise of a cooling method without significant harm in this engineered particulate and balloon technology we’ve been studying — but as a prerequisite for coming on board, and our accepting your backing, you must agree to decarbonize your company as swiftly as possible. Not only yours but the whole airline industry. Airline manufacturers, civil, military — the works. Perhaps that will mean shutting things down, at least in the short term, until a zero-carbon fuel source can be found. If it can be. Shrinking your footprint. No more growth. No more backing any oil and gas projects either. Surely you have enough money to live on by now, Roy. You could stop what you’re doing tomorrow, give most of it away, and still have enough. Make a model of yourself. Globally. Roy Hansen of Tempus Airlines. You’re a powerful man and a persuasive one, galvanizing even. Forget Mars. You could begin to change this world. Maybe you can even convince your pal Tony here, who’s done so much damage. That’s why I brought you —”

  “He might agree, he might even go out and say these things, but would he actually do them —” said Frank.

  Chair legs shrieked as Roy rose once more to his feet. “What right do you have —” only the steely voice of the third man cut over his.

  “I know who you are.” Across the table this man, the man named Tony, stood as well, loudly sucking in air. “You introduced yourself as Alan Wells, but that’s not the name you used to go by, is it, when, if I remember correctly, you headed up some Arctic climate centre down in the States. Took me longer than it should have to put the pieces together, Wells, because you look a little more ravaged now.” The man scrubbed his cheeks as if miming a beard.

  A small, hard belly protruded beneath his shiny leather jacket and there was something eerily persistent about his smile. Miranda had seen him before. He, too, had looked younger, his hair darker and there’d been more of it. He’d worn different glasses then, but his blunt, pugilist’s face had imprinted itself on her.

  Nine years before, in their Princeton living room, her mother had grabbed the remote and switched the television off, her body shielding Miranda from the images that still glowed there of the climate-change denier and her father while the voices of that man and the studio audience bounced off the walls. No proof, no proof. Then they were in the yard. Breathe, said Miranda’s beautiful mother, Jenny. There was dew beneath their feet and a tremble of cherry blossoms all around them, and her mother was holding Miranda’s hand. This moment, too, would live on inside Miranda, it was there in the cabin with her, even though a month after speaking these words her mother would be dead.

  “You’re Milan Wells, the climate scientist from Princeton.” The man’s face began to rearrange itself. “I thought you were some kind of fraud artist. Perhaps you are.”

  “Should I know you?” asked Roy, looming over Miranda’s father.

  “We had a little contretemps once upon a time,” said Tony from across the table, lifting his chin, at which Miranda’s father gave a bitter laugh.

  “A contretemps, is that what you call it, Tony? By which I presume you mean attacking scientific consensus and making me your whipping boy? Even if you weren’t personally responsible for the death threats against me and my daughter, for the death of my wife, you created the atmosphere for them.”

  Death threats — against her? The rage of Miranda’s father crackled like lightning in the air. Old fears, newly sharpened, pressed beneath Miranda’s ribs. How had she not known this? Her father met Miranda’s gaze and held it: he was trying to release his anger, let it dissolve into particles and drift. He was offering her an apology, for what, how much, she wasn’t yet sure.

  “Len consults Tony more than I do, not always wisely. It was Len’s idea to bring him along,” said Roy.

  “I thought it was your idea,” Len said gauntly. Every tendon in his body seemed to be engaged in trying to protect himself.

  “Sometimes Len goes a bit rogue, Roy,” said Tony. “He had this idea to cut you out of whatever R&D investment you were planning to make here. I’ve been trying to talk him out of it.”

  “It was my idea to bring Tony,”
Miranda’s father said as Len blanched. Only the smallest flicker at the corner of Roy’s eyes seemed to acknowledge what he’d heard. “I brought you here, Roy, because of your connection to Tony, because while you say one thing publicly, you’ve supported him and others, the ones who’ve sown so much discord and doubt. I brought you to an island so you can feel what it’s like to live on one, to see what the place might do to you, if you might lose yourselves and in the process find yourselves. I brought Frank here —”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Roy shouted.

  Miranda scrambled to her feet beside the stove. “I forgive you,” she said to Tony, “even though you helped destroy my life.” She didn’t know where the words came from. Were Tony’s actions truly forgivable? Had her father wanted her to meet him, and him to meet her? Anger rose in her as well. She knew that she was speaking not only to Tony, though perhaps her words entered him, because he gave a shudder. He was staring at her as if she were an alien being.

  Everyone in the room had turned in her direction. Her toes curled in her boots. Ella panted at her feet. Sweat streamed down the inside of her oilskin jacket.

  Roy was the one demanding, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Miranda Wells.” She wanted to get the words out before her father spoke for her. “I’m Milan’s daughter. You stole something from me,” she said to Tony, “but we found a way to remake ourselves, my father and I. You stole something too,” she said to Frank’s father. “The air, and you want to go on stealing it.”

  In response, Roy offered her one of his charismatic smiles. “How do you know my son? You arrived with him, didn’t you? I assumed you were some new inamorata he’d seduced with his clever, idealistic talk and dragged along for the ride.”