And this time, rather than ending with her usual sarcastic sign-off, she writes, “Sounds interesting and potentially worthwhile, Tuhoe. In fact, this wins my Least Offensive E-mail of the Day Award.”
~ * ~
At 1:45 a.m. he decides to do something about the telephone lines. Maya’s right. He can ask the prince to help, but he decides that it is more prudent to save his royal favors for the greater good of the project, or simply to save his ass. Instead, after digging up the man’s royal business card, he e-mails the minister of future commerce and tears into him, threatening him with his own deepening relationship with the prince and the prince’s high hopes and unflagging interest in the project. It would be a shame, Henry concludes, to have a simple misunderstanding between well-intentioned colleagues undermine the prince and his grand plan and cause him so much duress at this critical juncture in the nation’s history.
If this doesn’t work, he tells himself, pushing Send, then I absolutely will speak to the little bastard in person.
~ * ~
Even at two a.m., Madden, not surprisingly, is up and awake. He answers his sat-phone before the second ring. “At this hour, whatever you’re up to better involve sex, drugs, or immortality.”
“Nope. Water.” Henry gets directly to the point and asks for Madden’s help connecting him and perhaps brokering a deal with the people who distribute the LifeStraw.
“I can set something up tomorrow,” Madden replies. “Tonight, if you’re really fired up about saving the world.”
“Can’t. I have a playdate with the prince tomorrow.”
“Then day after. I’ll pick you up.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“Duly noted.”
~ * ~
As soon as he hangs up, he immerses himself in the work he and Maya had been outlining all day. Part social manifesto, part business plan. Part Maya, part Henry. He goes online and pulls quotes and headlines, statistics, images, and video clips. He researches desalinization plants, reverse filtration membranes, aquifer depletion, and deep-earth river disputes. He investigates UNICEF and the Tap Project and Charity: Water. He becomes fluent in the Walmart effect (in which big-box stores appear in remote third world regions and eliminate the culturally invaluable mom-and-pops), and the impact of upstream waste on downstream village wells in rural India, and the five most deadly waterborne diseases caused by pathogenic microorganisms known to man.
He employs the personality archetypes of Joseph Campbell to demonstrate desirable brand attributes.
He quotes from Robert Frost’s poem “Going for Water”:
The well was dry beside the door,
And so we went with pail and can . . .
He uses Ben & Jerry’s sustainability programs as a case study.
~ * ~
Through the template magic of Keynote a deck begins to emerge— “Happy Mountain Springs: The Purity Flows Through Us All”— that makes more strategic and ethical and monetary sense than he ever could have hoped for.
~ * ~
Halfway through the working night, on a whim, he clicks on the icon for his music library. And it’s there. Every song and playlist, miraculously restored. He stands, backs away from the computer, and walks to the window. The rain has stopped, and wet dirt lots of the empty neighborhood have taken on a moonlit gloss.
It’s a sign.
Of course it’s not, you wack job.
It’s weather.
It’s a miracle.
No, it’s a wonky computer.
~ * ~
Back at the kitchen table, he scrolls back and forth through it all, stopping to consider favorites as if looking at photos of loved ones. Having so many songs at your fingertips is amazing, but there are times, like now, when he wishes there were a more tangible aspect to the digital music.
Something to touch, or read, or clean your weed on.
To avoid waking Maya, he puts on his headphones before pushing Shuffle.
Here’s what comes up: “Smile Like You Mean It” by the Killers.
~ * ~
At 5:30 a.m. he finishes his final sentence, clicks Save, and e-mails a copy of the file to Meredith. Then, as a wild-card entry, he sends a copy to Norman, his Percocet-addicted former personal trainer and aspiring viral filmmaker. “Read this,” he writes. “Then make a film about it. Something that would make a group of sociopathic, egomaniacal corporate muckety-mucks want to implement it. Whatever you want, as long as it’s three minutes or less.”
Upstairs in the guest room/home office, he turns on the complimentary laser printer and spits out two sets after it has warmed up. He fans through the pages, stopping twice to read a particularly satisfying paragraph or look at the hard copy of a downloaded image.
It’s good. With feedback and input from Meredith and Maya, and encouraging news on the LifeStraw from Madden, it might be good enough for the likes of Giffler and Dworik, Pat and Audrey.
Back downstairs, he places one deck on the table next to Maya’s car keys. He stares at her for a moment. Outside, the sun is starting to backlight the mountains, and the rising cream glow enters the room like a ghost through the wall of a dream.
~ * ~
When he wakes up two hours later, Maya is gone.
The deck is gone too.
Next to the laptop is an empty water glass that wasn’t there when he went to bed. He touches the space bar and the Recently Added section of his music library appears onscreen. At the head of the section is a track called “Water Music.” The artist is listed as Maya. It’s a pop song, in the rigsar genre, a fusion of Indian, Nepalese, Bhutanese, and Galadonian music old and new, featuring a fifteen-string electronic version of the dranyen.
Even though he can’t understand a word of it and the melody is a little more techno-driven than what he normally prefers, in a strange way he kind of likes it.
~ * ~
Mister Henry
Shug is in the driveway at nine a.m. He’s chatting with Madison Ellison, who has picked up her wet plastic-wrapped newspaper and is fussing with the dried-up buds on a rhododendron near her mailbox.
Henry hadn’t planned on it, but it occurs to him that Madison Ellison might be worth talking to.
“I hear you’re meeting with the prince today,” she says after an exchange of matter-of-fact hellos in this most improbable of locales.
“I am. In fact, if you have a minute, before Shug and I leave, I’d love to run something by you.”
~ * ~
They walk into her house, leaving Shug fidgeting against the truck in the driveway. At her kitchen counter, he walks her through the deck in broad strokes.
When Henry is done, Madison Ellison, who knows her way around a multimedia presentation, says, “Interesting. The sustain-ability card. What exactly do you want from me?”
Henry shrugs. “An opinion. Some advice. Your take on what the prince will make of it.”
“Well, you’re not a client, but since the prince is and this ultimately could ladder up to his ultimate yet—off the record—almost certainly unattainable goal, I’ll tell you what I think. I think it’s ambitious, and though it’s a bit rough around the edges, it is well intentioned, well stated, and, most important, well reasoned.”
“Say I get approvals on my side and we’re able to cut a deal with the LifeStraw people. Do you think it has a chance?”
She steps back and considers Henry, then the open presentation deck on the countertop. “For anything to have a chance with the prince, the first thing you have to do is make it seem as if it is his idea. His royal lightning strike of inspiration. Even if you know and he knows deep down that this isn’t true, for appearance’s sake, you have to serve it up to him just so.”
“Okay.”
“And what you also have working in your favor is the fact that right now he’s desperate. He’ll consider any proposition thrown his way if it will somehow trigger some momentum and resurrect interest in this place. To lessen, if not stop, the bleeding. Every
day it seems as if another multinational is either scaling back or reneging on its promise to be part of his master plan. Look at this development. Six months ago it was all systems go. Trucks filled with workers and materials were coming in and out of here every ten minutes. Then things started falling apart in the States, then in the banks in Europe, and then here in USAVille. In the Shangri-La Zone. And now they’re—no offense to you and me—ghost towns.”
Shug beeps the horn in the driveway. Henry looks over his shoulder and can’t help but be impressed by the man’s audacity.
Madison Ellison continues. “For what it’s worth, if he doesn’t pay my company within the next two weeks, I’m going to be pulling out the tent stakes too. I imagine your company must be on the fence with this place as well.”
Henry says, “I guess,” though in truth he has no idea. “They’ve had so much internal turmoil the last few months—layoffs, mergers, defaults, takeovers—I’m not sure they’ve been paying a lot of attention to the tiny operation in the works here. So you think he might like this?”
She pauses again before answering. “I do. If it’s properly pitched. If he’s on the upswing of the manic-depressive, steroid rage pendulum. If he doesn’t further suspend human rights in the name of capitalism and democracy. If he has a good meeting with the Walmart delegation. If there isn’t a nonviolent coup. Or a successful assassination attempt. If he doesn’t find out that your friend Madden is cutting deals behind his back and, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, that your girlfriend hates him with every bone in her body. All very distinct possibilities, from what I’ve heard.”
The horn beeps again. Asshole. “If things really are this bleak,” he responds, “or if there’s a distinct possibility that any or all of this might come to pass, why are you still here?”
For the first time during the conversation, Madison Ellison smiles. “That’s easy. If any or all of it comes to pass, it will create an entirely new and different set of circumstances, which will present us with an entirely new and different set of opportunities. And clients. You see, Henry, the reason this place works for me is, beyond growing my business, I’m not emotionally invested in it. I don’t fucking care. And I’m hoping, for your sake, that you don’t either.”
~ * ~
“We will be late,” Shug tells him, tapping his watch. “You were expected at the call center at nine-thirty.”
Henry surprises Shug by getting into the front passenger’s seat. “I apologize, Shug. My fault.”
Twice Shug looks over his shoulder and anxiously considers the empty backseat before turning the key.
“You lose something back there?”
Shug shakes his head.
“Good. Anyway,” Henry explains, “the reason I’m late is I had an idea that I think might actually help a few people here in Galado who aren’t beholden to the prince or the cultural preservationists or a corporation, and I wanted to ask Ms. Ellison what she thought about it.” As they back out of the driveway, Henry rolls down his window, then says, “She actually kind of liked it. In fact, if you don’t mind, Shug, I’d love to hear what you think of it.”
Shug nods. It takes Henry about ten minutes to lay out a Shug-appropriate version of his proposal. If anything, he reasons, telling people such as Madison Ellison, Shug, Meredith, and even Norman is helping him hone his pitch, trim unnecessary details, and answer questions he hadn’t anticipated. For instance, “How long would each straw last?” and “What happens when they run out and you have thousands of people who have grown dependent on them?” And “It is not our nature to accept charity without reciprocating. What do you propose for people to do to somehow return the favor?”
All of which leads Henry to believe that Shug may approve of it and, by association, him. From his brief and guarded answers, Henry is able to discern that he doesn’t come from a river village but from a lowland town in the southern part of the country, where runoff pollution isn’t a major issue but raw sewage seeping into groundwater and wells is. “Many die because of this,” Shug says, with a weight that makes Henry think that included among the many was more than one of Shug’s loved ones.
Neither speaks for the last five minutes of the drive. When the truck stops in front of the call center, Shug turns to Henry. “So this is what your company intends to do here in Galado? This. . . straw?”
Henry shakes his head. He notices several dark blue Toyota work vans and an old Mitsubishi bucket truck parked alongside the back wall of the building. Phones! “It’s what I am going to try to get them to do,” he finally answers. “There are, as Madison Ellison told me and I’m sure you can confirm, a lot of variables. But yeah, I’d like to make it—the straw, cleaning up the water somehow—part of the mission here.”
Shug lifts his chin toward the building. “She gonna help you?”
“Maya?” Henry opens the door, gets out, and leans back inside. “I don’t know. I hope so. I think so. I know that I’d like to help her.”
Shug stares at the call center, as if looking intensely enough might summon her outside.
“Do you. . . do you think she’s a good woman?” Henry asks.
The older man inhales deeply before almost imperceptibly nodding. “I know her people a long time,” he answers. “Father, mother, brother, and nephew. They’ve been through a lot.”
Henry taps the roof, closes the door, and walks away. As he reaches the entrance of the call center, he hears the SUV’s horn beep again. He turns: What?
Shug leans across the front seat and says through the open window, “No later than three p.m. We cannot be late for the prince.”
After thinking about it for a moment, Henry turns and flashes his middle fingers at Shug, and to his surprise, the audacious bastard smiles.
~ * ~
Inside, Mahesh is talking to a group of three workers while the others are broken up into groups, earnestly going over, Henry presumes, his freshly amended and simplified scenarios. Mahesh looks up, waves, and smiles. Henry responds with an exaggerated salute.
In the back of the room a man in a gray suit is supervising three men in green jumpsuits who are threading long clumps of thin multicolored wires along the base of the wall. Outside, another worker feeds mere wire through a recently drilled hole in the wall. Henry is fairly sure that the man in the suit with his back to him, bent over at the waist and barking orders in Galadonian to the tech guys, is the minister of future commerce.
He feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns, surprised that Maya is here this early, but he’s not about to say so. “You had a busy night,” she says, showing her copy of the deck.
“I was on fire.”
She smiles and holds his gaze for a moment before tilting her head toward the bent-over man in the suit.
“The minister?”
“He says he got your e-mail in the middle of the night. He was here before we opened and has been looking for you all morning.”
“Good.”
“He said we should have service by the end of the day.”
“Nice.“
“What did you write to him?”
“Nothing, other than variations of ‘My very good friend the prince, unnecessarily angry and extremely disappointed.’”
“ ‘Mister Henry,’ he calls you.”
“I prefer Master Henry. Or the minister of all things aquatic, but fine.” He points at the deck. “So what do you think?”
She waves him toward a corner table. “I think . . . it’s a great start. But I have some thoughts.”
~ * ~
Royal Playdate
“Where’s the fish tank?”
“What fish tank?”
“There was a giant freaking fish tank right here the last time I visited.”
The chaperone looks at Shug and Henry, then shakes his head. “You must be mistaken. No fish tank.”
Shug dips an elbow into Henry’s side. “We really should be moving along, Mister Tuhoe.”
Henry doesn’t move alo
ng. Instead he steps closer to the dark-paneled wall where the fish tank was the first time he visited the prince and runs his forefinger along the fade lines left by the missing tank. “Right here. Gaily. The blind bottle-nosed Galadonian river-fish. Used sonar to catch smaller fish. The last known in existence. According to the prince, up until now it had survived for twenty million years without incident. Tell me,” Henry presses, “when did Gaily, um, pass?”
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