Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “And you said?”

  “I said it was time to pay the check, set all thoughts of temperance aside, and go get a whiskey. I took her down to a patriots’ bar I knew on Hudson Street, the Betsy Ross Saloon. Gents only, officially, but the bouncer and bartender knew I was a vet, so we had an understanding. Two fingers of Jim Beam and my suffragette got her color back; three fingers and she was ready to smoke one of my cigars. From there we went over to Washington Square, drunk as loons, and a bullyboy cop tried to arrest us for disorderly conduct and, in my case, public lewdness; so we took away his nightstick and threw him in a fountain. After which roughhousing my suffragette began to think there might be some hope for tomorrow after all.”

  “Did you ever actually answer her question?” Joan asked.

  “Verbally, you mean? Well,” said Kite, “you don’t disprove someone’s pessimism by adding up good and evil on a dessert napkin to see which is the greater total. Hope’s a choice, not a sum; you can have as much of it as you damn well feel like having, regardless of actual circumstances. But if you try to explain that straight out to someone when they’re in a bad mood, they’ll assume you’re being patronizing and may even throw something at you. It’s better to use a little finesse.”

  “Get them drunk,” Joan said. “Dunk a policeman.”

  “That’s one method. It did work.”

  “What about your suffragette’s comment that there’s always another war? Did you say anything more to her about that?”

  Kite shrugged. “Not much more I could say, once I’d stated the obvious. She was right. There is always another war. Thankfully, there’s also always another peace.”

  “And you don’t believe the recurrence of war makes peace meaningless?”

  “Good Lord,” said Kite. “Do you?”

  “No,” Joan said. “I’m just curious what you think.”

  “If you’re asking me whether I think a temporary peace is futile, then the answer is no; I don’t believe anyone who’s seen war firsthand would find even five minutes’ peace to be futile. But meaningless . . . I’m not sure any event has a meaning, until we humans decide to give it one. That’s why hope is optional rather than mandatory. I think we’re born with a need to explain the things that happen to us, not just to scientifically explain them but to actually create an account for them, a sort of framing-story to hang them on; and I think we have a wide variety of choices as to what our personal framing-story will be. But I also think some experiences are so overpowering that they defeat all our attempts to contain them in meaning, and those are the experiences that drive us to madness.”

  “Like what happened to Maxwell,” Joan said.

  “Like what happened to me.” Kite shook her stump. “The first question you ask yourself—the first question, even before ‘Will I live?’—is ‘Why? Why am I made to suffer this?’”

  “Seems like you found a better answer than Maxwell did.”

  “No,” Kite said. “I found I was able to get on without an answer, that’s all. Maxwell is still grasping for one.”

  “Your suffragette, though,” Joan said. “It can’t have been that traumatic for her, finding out that there’s no Utopia at the end of the petition drive.”

  “Oh no. Hers was a lesser trauma. One drawback in belonging to a race of storytellers is a tendency to forget that life isn’t a story, however great the need to perceive it as one. And one of life’s chiefest failings, from a storytelling perspective, is that life lacks closure.”

  “Closure in what sense?”

  “Closure in the sense of narrative convergence, all the elements coming together, loose ends tying off neatly after a final climax. Real life is never that tidy, and it doesn’t stop happening just because someone’s won a victory. Where the endpaper would come in a novel, actual events are followed by more actual events.”

  “So even if woman suffrage had led to paradise on earth . . .”

  “. . . something still would have had to happen next,” Kite said. “Further developments: births and migrations bringing new people with new ideas, older citizens adjusting their opinions in response, physical circumstances changing . . .”

  “New conflicts taking shape,” Joan said. “Another war.”

  “Well. Another struggle of some kind. And never mind if you’ve got no energy or patience left after the last one. That’s what my suffragette was so upset to learn: the only enduring antidote to struggle and the suffering that accompanies it is to somehow escape the future. And the only way to do that—the only real way, absent the wishful closure of a fable—is to die before the future gets here. What hope is, is deciding you’d rather be non-fictional than a corpse.”

  “Not a hard choice, huh?”

  “Never for me, no. I get tired of the bullshit, but never that tired.” Joan smiled. “Hence your impossibly advanced age.”

  “Damn right,” Kite agreed. “You know what the ancient Egyptian vizier Ptah-hotep had to say about all this? And by the way, I’m quoting from Bartlett’s, not from having met the man in person.”

  “What did he say?”

  “’Be cheerful while you are alive.’ Just a forty-eight-cent version of’Have a nice day,’ I suppose, but I’ve always thought it was good advice.”

  Kite signaled Sam 101 for a refill on her rum, while Joan shook a fresh cigarette from the pack. Two F.B.I. agents passed through the lounge car, checking for stowaways. Soon after they left, the train conductor blew her whistle; the car doors shut and sealed with a hiss, and the Thunderbolt glided forward out of Grand Central on its magnet cushion. At a peak speed of 340 miles per hour, Atlantic City was only thirty minutes away.

  “Tell us more about this East Coast earthquake,” Xander Menudo said. “Do you really believe it’s possible? Now I was chemically dependent throughout high school, so I can remember nothing about plaid tectonics, or whatever they call it, but I do recall hearing somewhere that New York City is founded on solid bedrock, so—”

  “Apparently solid,” said Tad Winston Peller. “Apparently solid. And yet it does move . . .”

  2008 Continued: A Deal with the Devil in the Middle of Nowhere

  There were no Lightning trains to take Joan and Harry to their first power lunch in July of ’08. After much thought and a long conversation with Lexa, Joan had agreed to discuss terms of employment, but only if she got to pick the venue. And so five weeks after the Landfill Protest March, Harry Gant flew to New York (white-knuckle all the way, but with no other choice, as Joan’s lunch plan already required more time off than he could reasonably spare). Joan met him at JFK and together they caught another flight to Montreal, and from there to Quebec City (“That does it,” Gant said, as severe turbulence rocked the little commuter turboprop on the final landing approach, “there’s got to be a faster way to travel without leaving the ground . . .”). In Quebec City they rented a four-wheel-drive jeep and went shopping at a camping outfitter’s store. Then they drove north.

  And north. And north. Major highways gave way to minor highways gave way to back roads gave way to woodland fire trails. After five hours of straight driving, during which Joan refused to talk business—“We aren’t there yet”—they stopped for the night at some tiny forest hamlet whose Québecois name would not fit on Gant’s tongue. In the morning they drove north some more.

  By noon of the second day Harry began to make jokes about meeting Santa Claus. “Relax,” Joan replied. “We aren’t even above the tree line.” She steered the jeep down a last rutted fire trail, to a meadow bisected by a brook and a row of guardian pine saplings that blocked any further progress by car or truck; and there she stopped and parked.

  “Last chance to use your satellite phone,” Joan told him. “Strictly lowtech from here on in. Tell your henchlings you’ll be out of touch for two days, maybe three.”

  “Three days?” Harry said. “Joan, just to get here has taken us—” But she was out of the jeep already, unloading a pair of drab canvas rucksacks from the back.


  There were two other jeeps in the meadow, both belonging to the occupants of a wooden sentry hut stationed just this side of the pine picket. The hut was the only human habitation in sight. Right next to it, standing almost as tall, was a wooden sign, rare in that it was one of the few signs in all of separatist Quebec to be written in more than one language. The English portion read as follows:

  BEYOND THIS LINE OF TREES BEGINS THE COVENANT PRIMEVAL WILDERNESS ZONE, CREATED BY THE QUÉBECOIS GREEN PRESERVATION ACT OF 1999. CONTRARY TO THE CUSTOM OF MOST NATIONAL PARKS AND WILDLIFE RESERVES, YOU ARE NOT AN HONORED GUEST. BY ENTERING THIS AREA YOU UNDERTAKE TO BECOME AN UNDISTINGUISHED MEMBER OF THE LOCAL ECOSYSTEM, WITH NO GREATER RIGHTS OR PRIVILEGES THAN ANY OTHER ORGANISM.

  PROSCRIBED ITEMS INCLUDE: FIREARMS, BOWS, AND SPEARS (ALL VARIETIES), KNIVES OVER 15 CM, SOUND AND IMAGE RECORDING AND REPLAY DEVICES (ALL VARIETIES), MAPS, COMPASSES, TIMEPIECES, FLASHLIGHTS, PORTABLE COMMUNICATION DEVICES, SANITARY NAPKINS, TOILET PAPER. A COMPLETE CONTRABAND LIST IS AVAILABLE IN THE WARDENS’ STATION. ALL POSSESSIONS MUST BE APPROVED BY THE WARDENS BEFORE PROCEEDING. WARDENS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ITEMS LEFT IN UNATTENDED VEHICLES.

  TRAILBLAZING, CARTOGRAPHY, AND THE FELLING OF TREES ARE PROHIBITED. THE ERECTION OF PERMANENT STRUCTURES IS PROHIBITED. HUNTING AND FISHING ARE PERMITTED (BARE HANDS, POCKET KNIVES, AND BONE HOOKS ONLY), BUT ONLY AT SUBSISTENCE LEVELS; NO “TROPHIES” MAY BE TAKEN. FIRES MUST BE ATTENDED AT ALL TIMES AND THE REMAINS SCATTERED AFTER EXTINGUISHING.

  REMEMBER, YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. THOUGH WARDENS CONDUCT OCCASIONAL PATROLS TO INSURE THAT RULES ARE BEING FOLLOWED, AND MAY AT THEIR DISCRETION AID LOST OR INJURED VISITORS, YOU SHOULD NOT EXPECT RESCUE. HELICOPTERS WILL NOT BE SUMMONED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE.

  “Wait a minute,” Gant said. “Joan—”

  “Come on, Harry. We want to get moving while there’s still plenty of daylight.”

  “But Joan . . . no rescue teams? No toilet paper?”

  “Just come on.”

  There were three wardens on duty, only one of whom would speak English. He was pleasant enough, even if he did assume that Joan and Harry were married. “Your husband looks nervous,” he told Joan.

  “That’s because he is nervous,” Joan replied. “He’s from cities. He’s never seen a moose before.”

  “Moose?” said Harry. “They have moose?”

  The two “non-English-speaking” wardens found this hilarious. They began to make wild animal noises and to mutter arcane French words like loup and ours that Gant did not find at all comforting. The friendly warden, meanwhile, checked both backpacks for contraband and used a color chart to verify that all their articles of clothing fell within an acceptable spectrum: for even unnatural hues, like the bright orange of hunters’ safety vests, were forbidden here. After completing the inspection he had both Joan and Harry sign an international waiver of liability. “Put down your expected date of return,” he said, “and a next-of-kin that we might contact if you are more than a season late. Also, leave the keys to your vehicle.”

  “No maps?” Harry said, when they had shouldered their packs and crossed beyond the row of pines. “No compass? Not that I’ve ever done this before, but doesn’t that make it pretty easy to get lost?”

  “You have to pick your landmarks very carefully,” Joan agreed. “And you don’t dare go too far in unless you know how to survive in the wilderness with minimal tools. Which means that the majority of the land is effectively off limits to tourists, which is the point. If you’re a weekend camper out for a quick and easy commune with nature you go to La Mauricie or Mont Tremblant, which are closer to the big cities and have public rest rooms.”

  “But you’ve been here before. I mean—you do know how to find your way around, right?”

  “I came up with Lexa Thatcher and her friend Ellen once. Back in ’02, I think, definitely before the Pandemic. We got lost and almost ran out of food, but we got to see wolves so we didn’t mind. Yes, wolves, and don’t look so jumpy. Just follow the stream and keep your eyes open, we’ll see some good things.”

  He did, and they did. A fox, for starters; a docile porcupine squatting on a lightning-struck stump; a pair of otters in the stream; and sometime later, a black bear, which surprised Gant by being disinterested rather than fierce. It stepped from a gap between two pines, turned its snout briefly towards the pair of humans as if to scent their intentions, and lumbered on its way without stopping.

  “Huh,” Gant said, only a fraction paler than normal. “That’s an ours?”

  “That’s an ours.”

  “Huh. How about that.”

  The land to their right began to rise as the afternoon waned, forming a dotted chain of hills beside the streambed. Joan spied a distinctive natural cairn of stones at the base of one such hill and nodded in recognition. She gave a tug on Gant’s sleeve. “Let’s see if it’s still up there.”

  “If what’s still up where?”

  “Just follow me,” Joan said, and splashed across the stream.

  The hill above the stone cairn was the steepest incline Harry Gant had ever tackled without the help of stairs or an escalator, and for the rest of his life he would recall this as his first and last experience with mountain climbing, a personal Everest; the modest thirty-meter ascent left him breathless with the sense of great altitudes conquered. Joan, meanwhile, clapped her hands as she reached the top and saw that she’d remembered correctly: stationed at the crest was an abandoned one-room hunter’s lodge, a shack, really, but with a sun porch that jutted out over the steepest face of the hill and gave a view. Joan walked up to the lodge and moved aside the door, which no longer swung on hinges. “Good news, Harry,” she said. “You get to sleep indoors tonight.”

  Inside, the floor planking had begun to rot through, and most of the roof was missing; any furniture had long since been broken up by previous visitors to use as fuel in the rusty oil-drum stove. Joan thunked the porch good and hard with her foot before trusting her whole weight to it, but it at least still seemed sturdy. She stepped out on the deck and used a paper match to light a cigarette.

  “They don’t spend much on upkeep, do they?” Gant said.

  “This was built before they passed the Preservation Act,” Joan told him. “They’re letting it decay, same as any other human structure in the Wilderness. Not far west of here there’s a nuclear power plant that never got finished, with lichen growing on the cooling towers. Of course, northwest of here Hydro-Quebec’s latest hydroelectric project just put fifty thousand acres of woodland under water. The separatist parliament’s policies on the environment aren’t a hundred percent consistent.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Gant said. “Processed tobacco is more natural than toilet paper?”

  Joan glanced at the burning Gauloise in her hand. “Oh,” she said, “that. Well, see, most of the Québecois Greens are chain-smokers . . .”

  “Well I assume most of them go to the bathroom, too.”

  “Priorities, Harry. Anyway, the wardens counted my smokes on the way in and they’ll count the butts when we come back out. And you don’t even want to know what they do to people who start forest fires.”

  “No, probably I don’t.” Gant removed his pack and found an unrotted section of floor to set it on. “So now that we’re here, Joan, can we talk about—”

  She held up a hand to forestall him. “Before you start your pitch,” she said, “come out here on the porch and take a look.”

  He came out, stepping carefully; with the ground sloping down almost vertically beneath it, the porch definitely qualified as heights. Looking out over the drop, he could see that they were at one end of a long, forested valley, and that the stream they had been following fed into a round coin of a lake that the westering sun’s alchemy was turning from silver to bronze to copper. At the water’s edge, a moose bent its head to drink; like the bear, it wasn’t as fearsome an animal as he’d imagined. A noble beast, actually, at this distance. B
ut what really moved Gant, what cut through his civilized jadedness and touched his heart more than anything else he saw, were the beavers. Real ones, not battery-powered: a family of at least six, puttering around a dam of fallen timbers.

  “Huh,” Gant said. “Wow.”

  “What do you think?” Joan asked. “Worth the hassle?”

  “I don’t suppose,” he replied, “that you snuck a pair of binoculars past those Frenchmen.”

  “Sorry, Harry. We can hike down to that lake if you want.”

  “No, no, let’s let the moose finish drinking in peace. Tell me though, is Nigeria like this?”

  “There’s less snow in winter, generally.”

  “But is it like this?”

  “Worth not poisoning, you mean? Sure.”

  Harry Gant nodded. “You see?” he said. “This is exactly why I want to hire you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of this.” He spread his arms. “Bringing me here, showing me firsthand what’s at stake with this issue. Plus the obvious strength of your convictions. You’re exactly the sort of person I want to be the guiding force behind environmental policy at Gant.”

  Joan stubbed out her cigarette on the porch railing and dropped the butt in her pocket. “Tell me something, Harry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever have any intention of opening a landfill in Africa?”

  Gant blinked. “What makes you ask that?”

  “I’ve had time to mull it over since the march,” Joan said. “I remember enough about the talks we used to have when we were together back at Harvard to recognize a Harry Gant idea when I see it. . . or when I don’t see it. The Automatic Servant, for instance, that feels like your style; so does the Minaret, and that business about rebuilding the Empire State Building. But waste management?” She shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s a lucrative industry, but it’s not really ‘neat,’ is it?”

  “Well . . .”