Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “Hey Joan, it’s me,” Lexa said. “I need some help creating a media circus. You still interested in running a campaign to limit post-war African development?”

  “Interested, but pessimistic,” Joan told her. “I can’t find funding for a campaign like that. Seems like all the people with money either don’t care or are already investing in the land grab.”

  “Well I think I’ve found a way we can raise the public consciousness a little. Guess what your ex-boyfriend is up to.”

  “Which ex-boyfriend?”

  “The almost porn star. Harry Gant.”

  “Oh God,” Joan said. “They talked him into making robot soldiers, didn’t they?”

  “No, he’s still a pacifist. But he’s planning to turn the former nation of Nigeria into a garbage dump.”

  “What?”

  “I have in front of me a confidential proposal for a two-million-acre landfill to be constructed in the Northern High Plains region of Nigeria, under contract to the new Africorp Division of Gant Industries. They want to bring waste material to the Slave Coast in Superscow trash barges, then transfer it by rail to the landfill, which at two million acres works out to thirty-one hundred square miles of toxic refuse lying in unlined pits. There’s also a companion plan to sink mineshafts into the Jos Plateau for permanent storage of nuclear waste, though as far as I can tell from this proposal, nobody has actually conducted a seismic survey to determine whether the Plateau is geologically stable.”

  “Jesus. How do they expect to get away with this? No, wait, stupid question. Tell you what, let’s agree right now on a date and I’ll start making calls. If Gant thinks he can do this without a fight, he’s wrong. You back me up in print, I’ll make him be wrong.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  The Nigeria Landfill Protest March was slated for June 7th—incidentally, the fourth anniversary of the Catholic Womanists’ march on the Vatican. Joan rallied the ground troops while Lexa fanned the media bonfire, calling in favors to get early attention focused on the event and the issue. The protesters chose defilement as their theme: of course Africa’s natural resources would continue to be exploited, everybody understood the war had been about petroleum and mineral rights despite the president’s rhetoric to the contrary, but would that exploitation be chastened by respect for the Pandemic’s victims, or would the reckless pursuit of profit strip away every last shred of human decency? Dumping garbage in a graveyard: was that to be the symbol of Africa’s future?

  Media commentators played up the high moral timbre of the march, though cynics predicted a disappointing turnout, especially if the weather was bad. Callous as it might sound, the cynics said, survivors had already put the African Pandemic behind them, forgetting it as swiftly and expediently as they had forgotten about AIDS. Job security in the whipsawing postplague/post-war economy was of far greater interest to the American public than accusations of land rape in Nigeria; that was human nature.

  Well, maybe. But by 9 A.M. on June 7th the streets surrounding the Gant (née Turner) Minaret were jammed with angry men and women—a tribute to something finer, Joan Fine liked to think, than her own propaganda skills, though in truth she’d worked damned hard to make this happen.

  At 9:30 A.M., Harry Gant came out of his half-built tower to face the will of the people. He’d refused all public comment in the weeks leading up to the march, classic corporate stonewalling, but now at the moment of truth he walked out of the Minaret alone, with neither bodyguards nor press agents to protect him. He wore his best suit and tie, his hair was deliberately tousled, and above his head he waved a white flag of surrender.

  A real white flag.

  The crowd gave way before his capitulation. Gant trod the path they opened for him, clambering atop a huge industrial sculpture at the center of the Minaret’s west concourse, an acid-scoured pyramid with a giant open hand balanced palm-upwards at its apex. There he stood, a man in a high place alone, only not alone: surrounded by a hundred thousand witnesses, with CNN gun cameras transmitting his every motion to a hundred million more. In full view of this audience, Harry Gant held up a blue folder—the blue folder—and tore it in half.

  The cheers of the protest marchers could be heard for miles. Ellen Leeuwenhoek shot a photo essay of Gant’s surrender, while Lexa Thatcher attacked her consort of the day, a sweet young Georgian boy named Comfort. Sister Ellen Fine, who had come to Atlanta despite the worsening lung cancer that would soon end her life, was moved near to tears. “Oh, Joanie,” she said, “if we’d only had half as many as this in Rome . . .”

  Joan whistled and cheered along with the others, but she also kept a wary eye on Harry, whom she frankly didn’t believe was this much of a pushover. Corporate heads never gave in so quickly, not where such high profits were at stake. When the cheering had subsided sufficiently for Gant to address the crowd—this was a quarter of an hour later—Joan paid close attention to his words, alert for the sucker ploy she knew must be coming.

  Gant spoke into a lapel mike; loudspeakers atop the Minaret boomed his voice out for blocks in all directions. He began with an apology. It had been immoral and just plain wrong, he said, to even consider the Nigeria Landfill Project. He could offer no excuse or justification for the breach, nor did he expect the public to accept one; what he could do was tell them that the recent death of his business partner, Christian Gomez, had brought Gant Industries to a crossroads, a threshold moment of change and reorganization, and today’s protest had helped him see the need for a strong ethical component to that change. To this end, he would be forming a new advisory board within the company. This “Department of Public Works” (or “Public Opinion”; he wasn’t quite sure of the name yet) would review the environmental and social impact of all future Gant Industries undertakings, offering guidance and—if necessary—a stern hand of reproach to Gant management.

  “Right,” Joan said. She shouted from the foot of the pyramid: “Who’s going to head this new department, Harry? The chairman of Dutch Shell?”

  Joan’s voice was not miked, but Gant heard her, and repeated her words in his response: “Ms. Joan Fine, who doesn’t trust me—good for her—has just asked a very important question. She wants to know who’s going to be in charge of this new department I’m proposing. I’ll state it clearly for the record, and if you find out later that I’ve lied I encourage you all to phone Washington and sic a congressional subcommittee on me: Gant Industries’ environmental and social policy will not be set by Shell Petroleum, or by the friendly but somewhat partisan folks at Union Carbide, De Beers Mineral, or I. G. Farben GmbH & Co.

  “As I see it, there are only two people with sufficient credibility to serve as my new conscience. Robert Redford, unfortunately, is no longer with us. That leaves you, Joan.” The man in the high place alone looked to the foot of the pyramid and smiled. “Joan Fine will be the new comptroller of public works at Gant Industries. She’ll start work as soon as she’s willing, at a salary and benefit level low enough to make clear to everyone that she’s not being bought out; and if she doesn’t give me at least enough grief to make me regret having hired her, she will not have fulfilled her mandate.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for coming here today to communicate your dissatisfaction to me. Our great American capitalist system is based on the law of supply and demand; I trust you’ll remember my invitation to smack me with Big Government if Ms. Fine and I fail to supply what you have demanded. In the meantime, please, enjoy the summer weather and the southern hospitality of Atlanta, and have a wonderful day.”

  2023: A Nineteenth Amendment Poster Girl

  Joan and Kite arrived at Grand Central in time to catch the 11:30 Atlantic City Thunderbolt. Harry Gant had phoned ahead from the Phoenix and ordered a private lounge car coupled to the rear of the train. Joan might have refused the luxury, except that the rest of the train was nonsmoking; besides which, Kite had no intention of giving up an opportunity to ride in style. “Let’s not be
too self-mortifying before lunch, Joan.”

  The lounge car was pressurized, its exterior as streamlined as any other part of the bullet train, but inside it was furnished like a Prohibition-era speak-easy, with red velvet wall-to-wall carpet, dark wood ceiling, slow-rotating fans, a player piano, octagonal mahogany-and-suede poker tables, batwing chairs, and an Automatic Servant (Sam 101) tending bar. For the pleasure of those passengers who found the real landscape boring or unromantic, projector screens could be lowered over the lounge car’s windows, and any one of a thousand artificial views selected from a recorded library; since the train rode smoothly on a cushion of magnets, with little sense of motion except when accelerating and decelerating near stations, the chosen views could be either moving or static according to passenger preference. Fixed overlooks of an idealized Chicago waterfront were especially popular.

  Joan and Kite had only just boarded when a conductor announced that the Thunderbolt would be delayed in the station, pending a search by Un-Un-American agents. Anxious to be underway, Joan lowered the projector screens and selected a high-speed lunar panorama, with little green men in moon buggies who raced the train across the Sea of Tranquility; she also turned on the TV over the bar. Kite had Sam 101 bring her a tumbler of iced rum, and settled into a comfortably sprung batwing chair to read a used copy of Atlas Shrugged she’d bought with her autograph money. Both women lit cigarettes.

  On television, famed disaster chronicler Tad Winston Peller was being interviewed by talk show host Xander Menudo.

  “I heard a rumor,” Xander was saying, “that you’re related to the late Hollywood director Irwin Allen. Now I’m not sure how many of the viewers will remember Allen, but—”

  “We’re spiritually related,” said Peller. “Though of course Irwin lived in much simpler times than we do.”

  He had chubby cheeks, Peller did; they’d been chubby in his twenties, at the time of his first author photo, and they were still chubby today, though with the onset of middle age they were beginning to droop and form jowls. “Tad Winston Peller,” one critic had noted, “is turning into a human Hush Puppie.”

  “Well tell us,” said Xander, “and I know you get asked this on every show, after every book you write, and yet still the topic never ceases to fascinate: what is it that makes you want to chronicle catastrophes? Why the love affair with plane crashes, tidal waves, and now earthquakes?”

  “I’m not so sure it’s a love affair . . .”

  “Well, but by that I only mean that you show a strong devotion to—”

  “What I’m devoted to,” Peller interrupted him, “what moves me, what I’m really trying to chronicle in my books . . . it’s this generation . . . by which I mean both this generation of human beings coming of age right now, and also my own, my personal generation, the generation that came of age at the millennium. Which is a lost generation.”

  “Which, your generation, or this one?”

  “Mine . . . that is, both . . . that is, it’s all lost, it’s getting more lost all the time. If I were a priest rather than a member of the literati, I’d probably be out in the desert somewhere, warning about the last days.”

  “Ah,” Xander nodded sagely. “The Apocalypse.”

  “Exactly, the Apocalypse. I think the Apocalypse speaks to us—‘us’ meaning the lost generation, both lost generations, lost people everywhere—it speaks to us like nothing else can anymore. I can remember the bleakness of my college years, coming into adulthood under such a terrible shadow . . .”

  “The aftermath of the Pandemic. The African and Syrian wars.”

  “Well, yes, of course, those things too, though what I’m primarily referring to is the overwhelming sense of ennui that afflicted me and my fellow classmates at Bennington. All our money and privilege couldn’t buy a cure for our basic disaffection with life, a disaffection that was and is, perhaps, the greatest disaster of all.”

  “So true,” agreed Xander. “’All dressed up and no place to go.’ I can’t think of a more tragic sentiment.”

  “No. Neither can I.”

  “Kite?” Joan said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you ever feel like giving up hope on the human race?”

  “Periodically.” Kite looked up from her book. “But then I remember how many lost generations I’ve seen make good in spite of their overweening self-pity, and reality snaps back into perspective.” She squinted at the television. “He’s a fat little chipmunk, isn’t he?”

  “The fattest,” Joan agreed.

  “Hope.” Kite repeated, taking a swallow of rum. “A feminist quizzed me on that subject once. Did I ever tell you that one, how the suffragettes tried to make a hero out of me?”

  “No. Did they?”

  “God’s truth. Wanted me for a Nineteenth Amendment poster girl.” Kite stared at the ceiling and recited, as if reading from an old broadside: “‘Sarah Emma “Kite” Edmonds, native of Prince William parish, New Brunswick, who on her thirteenth birthday received as a gift from her mother a copy of M. M. Ballou’s Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain. This innocuous present—the first novel-length fiction the young Sarah had ever read, and intended solely as a diverting pastime—so inspired her that she cut her hair, assumed male attire and the alias Frank Thompson, and traveled south to the United States to seek her fortune as a man. She obtained masculine employment, first as a door-by-door Bible seller in the state of Connecticut, then as a more general purveyor of fine literature in the city of Flint, Michigan. It was also in Flint that she answered her new country’s call in its hour of need and joined the Union Army of the Potomac, serving as nurse and foot soldier, and demonstrating by her conduct over the course of the four-year conflict both the competence and the civilizing influence that is womankind at her empowered best.’ Etcetera.” Kite chuckled. “These New England feminists, Joan, they wrote an entire biography—the length of a small pamphlet—without ever consulting me personally. Made me out to be quite the saintly figure, not a very polite thing to do without permission. So happened I was in Sonora at the time, beyond the reach of the mails and presumed dead, and this tract had been in print for half a decade before I even heard of it. Another half decade passed before I finally met my first suffragette, the daughter of a friend of a friend of Susan B. Anthony. We did lunch in Manhattan, must’ve been spring of nineteen ought-five.

  “I showed up in full drag, of course—it seemed fitting. Puffing on a big Havana cigar, too, which did not make a favorable first impression. Once I’d pitched the stogie, though, we got on all right through biscuits and tea. Over soup I began voicing my objections to the Kite Edmonds biography as written, objection number one being that I hadn’t intended any of my actions as a demonstration of ‘womankind at her empowered best.’ I put on trousers for the sake of one woman only—me—and I joined the army because I didn’t know where to go to sign up as one of Fanny Campbell’s pirate crew. War was my adventure, my escape from a dull future as some potato farmer’s wife; I hadn’t a care for nobler motives, I just wanted to have a good time, and not as a liberated woman, but as one of the boys. So it didn’t seem fair, really, to cast me as a radical.”

  “Was the suffragette disappointed?” Joan asked.

  “Disappointed would be the wrong word. You have to remember—or try to imagine—that Utopian ideals weren’t the big joke then that they’ve since become. So many things were still new to the world: technology and all its promises, plus the whole raft of social experiments that hadn’t yet been tried—communism, temperance, the Esperantists’ dream of global unity through shared language. It was still easy to believe in miracles of human transformation then, before the World Wars swept most of that innocence away forever. The suffragettes never argued that women should have the vote for reasons of equality; they claimed that women were superior to men and wouldn’t just double the lines at the polls, but would elevate the moral character of politics, and of society as a whole, to new heights undreamed of. Who knew? Men had made
such a hash of things during their tenure in power, it seemed perfectly logical to suppose that women would do a better job.

  “So there I was, the voice of practical experience, tucking into the Chicken Florentine and describing how a real woman had distinguished herself from men in wartime—which is to say, not at all. I confessed what a mediocre nurse I’d been, despite my innate nurturing tendencies; fact is I was much handier with a gun than with bandages. I told her about the men I’d killed, the men I’d seen killed around me, and how my aura of femininity hadn’t lessened the gruesome horror of it one whit. Unfortunately, what makes war terrible isn’t that the soldiers are men; it’s that men are soldiers. Let women become soldiers—or politicians, or diplomats—and you haven’t changed war at all. The uniforms just get a little wider through the hips.

  “Well, I went rattling on and on about this, not leaving out a single cannon burst or bayonet thrust, and by dessert—a scrumptious Prussian cheesecake, as I recall—my suffragette was ashen. ‘If what you say is true,’ she told me, ‘then there is no hope for tomorrow.’ To which I replied: ‘Oh yes there is, ma’am. War is hell despite best intentions to the contrary, it wouldn’t be right to lie about that, but the war ended.’ To which she replied: ‘What difference can that make? There will be other wars; there already have been.’ And I said: ‘Yes, ma’am, of course that’s true, there will be other wars, but not right away; and when they do happen, I don’t intend to fight in them.’ And she said: ‘But others will fight in them. Another war, and another war, and another war,’—I confess, she was more realistic on this point than I was at the time—‘and another war, each one bringing more pain and more death. And if we cannot break this cycle, if we cannot count on woman to change the fundamental nature of our reality, then I ask you: what hope can we have?’”