Veil

by Eliot Peper

  “There is no sacrifice too large for Zachary’s,” said Galang like a captain going down with his ship. “And any boys that don’t appreciate the incomparable pheromones of tomato and basil don’t deserve my attention anyway.”

  Zia looked up into Galang’s wide eyes. His chestnut irises were twin time machines that took her back two decades. Instead of Galang the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, she saw Galang the gangly fourteen-year-old showing up with the rest of their privileged, abandoned cohort to run the petty, savage, searing gauntlet of boarding school.

  “You,” Zia punched Galang’s shoulder, “are a very nice person.”

  Galang batted her hand away.

  “Oh, come on,” he said, but his eyes sparkled.

  “So, what is it this time?”

  Galang stretched luxuriously. “Gonna chill by the pool and get my tan on.”

  Zia just raised her eyebrows.

  “Okay, okay,” said Galang. “You know how the Maldives anchored their floating city to the submerged islands? Well, a few years back they decided that New Malé would never be anything more than a stopgap, so they started a resettlement program. The government signed treaties with other governments trading certain rights for special displacement visas. Buuuuuuuut, as you might have guessed, those visas haven’t been distributed as originally intended. A ring of officials has been accepting bribes for the prime spots and simultaneously siphoning off funds intended to make good on the treaties.” Galang waggled a finger. “Naughty, naughty. A steaming pile of blatantly selfish bullshit. Anyway, I’ve been tracking it for nine months now and Aafreen just hooked me up with some local sources, turns out one of the dickwad crooked officials is her second cousin, so I’m heading down to flooded paradise to rake some motherfucking muck.”

  Zia shook her head. “I worked on the island evac.”

  “I know,” said Galang quietly.

  The sour tang of brine and flooded sewer. An old fisherman, skin a contour map of wrinkles, his arthritic claws latched onto the railing in front of his hut as storm surge lapped at his bony hips, fighting off Zia as she attempted to pull him aboard the Zodiac. Kneeling in front of a child in an oversized life jacket and telling the little girl with the scared eyes and the heart-shaped face to think of this as an adventure. Boat after boat disgorging blinking, confused refugees into the floating capital to face the arbitrary bureaucratic fate that lacked the clarity but retained the powerless terror of the natural disaster they had narrowly escaped. Zia’s frustration at the need to appeal for public support, the money flowing in from all over the world when she managed to pluck a few heartstrings. The late night sessions working with Aafreen to try to create a better process for getting people back on their feet, a process that didn’t suffer from the same mistakes that sabotaged so many well-intentioned programs, the over-caffeinated tumble of ideas reminding them both of rehearsing declensions for Latin exams.

  “Give her a hug from me,” said Zia. “It was so good to see her in Switzerland.”

  “I know, right?” said Galang. “We can’t depend on the odd high-school reunion. We need to get the old gang back together more often.”

  “It’s hard. We’re all scattered around the world and everyone’s got their own jobs, worries, and even kids. Life, right?”

  “Despite my fervent intention to avoid such a catastrophe at any cost, we are getting old.”

  “I feel terrible for Kodjo,” said Zia. “The whole situation sounds like a shit show.”

  “Phew! It’s about time,” said Galang. “Lucy was a devil in disguise. Did you know that she cheated on him with the agriculture minister and they colluded to have Kodjo thrown out of office?”

  “Seriously? I mean, I knew she was a snake, but I didn’t know that.”

  “And Vachan finally standing up to his ācci.” Galang let out a long, low whistle. “I never thought I’d see the day. Have you met her?”

  Zia nodded. “They had me over for string hoppers when I was stationed in Trincomalee. She is a force of nature.”

  “I just hope he doesn’t pull any punches. The way their family works, if he shows the slightest sign of weakness, she’ll build a coalition among the cousins to replace him. If fortune had played a different hand, that woman could have dominated the Kremlin. She’s a born autocrat.”

  “Daniela is killing it though.”

  “She played me a few tunes from their next batch of albums,” said Galang. “There were a few super trippy tracks, but for the most part, I didn’t quite grok it. Of course, that means less than nothing because I’ve never had an ear for cool. What I do know is that Daniela has such a finely tuned ear for cool that I can’t tell whether she’s identifying trends before they break out or whether it’s her blessing that makes them pop.”

  “Both,” said Zia.

  Galang laughed. “Good point. The zeitgeist is the zeitgeist is the zeitgeist.”

  “You somehow always manage to know everything about everyone.”

  “That’s why you need me around, sister. Ears to the tracks.”

  Zia laughed. “Some things never change. You’re still trading gossip like a prying teenager.”

  “Gossip gets a bad rap,” said Galang. “Love, war, art, all the important things in life are gossip. We’re like electrons, we only exist in relation to each other.”

  “Yet another thing that never changes: you always have a response to everything.”

  “A professional hazard, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I guess it’s journalism that’s kept you in touch with folks. Chasing stories around the world. Shining a light on abuse of power. You better watch out, somebody’s going to turn your life into a blockbuster biopic one day.”

  “Yeesh, I hope not. But… If they do, promise me that you will personally ensure they get Hasan Herianto to play me. He’s so dreamy.”

  “Hah, like I have Hollywood hookups.”

  “It’s far more likely that they make the movie about you.” Galang wiggled his fingers and dropped his voice an octave. “Zia León travels the world rescuing people from disaster. Daughter of a tech billionaire and an environmental luminary, she fights to relieve the suffering of strangers amidst the wreckage of a dying planet.”

  “Oh, the melodrama,” said Zia. She didn’t show it, but the joke stung because it hit a little too close to home. Decade-old headlines scrolled across her vision whenever she curled up on her hard cot and closed her eyes. Electrical Grids Fail Across the Tropics as Temperature Spikes. Nineteen Countries Declare State of Emergency. Heat Wave Death Toll Hits 20 Million. The maddening pity of the Costa Rican president elect as she accepted Zia’s withdrawal from ambassadorial appointment. The impossible chasm that had opened between Zia and her father, grief wrenching them apart along an invisible fault line. She took a sip of chai, letting the spicy, creamy, sweetness wash away her angst. “Production would stop as soon as the film crew discovered how mundane humanitarian aid really is. Logistics isn’t particularly cinematic.”

  “Meh,” Galang waved away her objection. “Montage, montage, montage. They’d need to inject some drama though, maybe a spurned lover? Or is there something along those lines already developing?”

  Zia guffawed as Galang leaned in conspiratorially.

  “Alas, no,” she said. “I’m super boring. All work, no play. Hardly worth your layover.”

  Galang gave her a look that communicated his deep concern that Zia was turning into an ascetic monk suffering from that strangest form of sexual perversion: celibacy. She responded with a lascivious wink that she hoped implied a whimsical preference for the freedom of un-attachment. She wasn’t a monk, she was a knight errant. Or at least that’s what she tried to tell herself on the rare occasion that she actually had time to entertain such banalities.

  Galang leaned across the table. “Speaking of drama, have you decided what to do about Tommy?”

  Zia rubbed her forehead. “Shit. Jason’s been harassing me about it almost dai
ly, which is maddening but understandable. We could really use the money. We can always use the money. But taking oil money to respond to climate change catastrophes?”

  “It has a certain twisted logic.”

  “And then there’s the fact that it’s Tommy.”

  “You know what I think of him,” said Galang. “But you probably shouldn’t be taking financial advice from a journalist, we’re barely managing to keep our industry afloat as it is.”

  “You know what I think of him,” said Zia. She shook her head. “Twisted logic seems to be precisely what my job requires these days.”

  “I hear you,” said Galang with feeling.

  “Maybe that’s why I’ve been distracted lately.”

  “With what?”

  The chill of alpine breeze on naked skin, stars wheeling above. It starts, as all truly great stories do, on a dark and stormy night—better yet, it’s about why we can’t seem to make sense of how nights get all dark and stormy in the first place.

  “So you know how global temperatures have leveled out over the past few years?” asked Zia.

  Galang nodded. “No scientist I’ve interviewed has been able to fully explain it. Lots of handwaving.”

  “Right,” said Zia. “Selai has made it her mission to figure out why, or at least why scientists can’t explain it.”

  “Really? Now that’s interesting. When she sets her mind to something…”

  “…something usually gives before she gives up,” said Zia. “Exactly.”

  “What about Haribo?” asked Galang. “Isn’t she being paid gobs of money to gallivant around the world taking exceptionally gorgeous photos of gummy bears?”

  “Well, that’s the other thing about Selai,” said Zia. “As soon as she masters something, she moves on. This is me reading between the lines, but I think she wanted to treat social media virality as a problem she could solve. Once she broke the internet, Haribo got excited and Selai got bored. So when she started hearing from her uncles in the Fijian cabinet how unreliable climate models threw off all their infrastructure plans, she started digging. You know how serious Fiji is about climate science.”

  “It’s never fun to be a canary in a coal mine.”

  “Right. She’s read every paper, ripped out the innards of every model like a mechanic gutting a clunker, and done her own tests running open-source Mozaik architecture on top of the Interstice research data pool. She told me about it at the reunion and I’ve been reviewing her materials.”

  “And?”

  “The upshot is that the numbers just don’t add up,” said Zia. It had felt good to dig so deeply into something that her mind began to run scenarios on autopilot. “Until a few years ago, climate models made somewhat different projections from each other but generally agreed on what direction we were headed and what inputs were causal. But none of them projected global temperatures leveling out, and nobody has been able to identify why they were wrong. There are a lot of folks tossing around theories, but when you do the math, none have enough explanatory power to make sense of it.”

  “Hence the handwaving.”

  “Correct,” said Zia. “Selai’s still doing mathematical forensics. The models are insanely complex, so there’s a lot there. But I started thinking about you and me, all the scientists we talked to while editing my mom’s book.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And I’m wondering whether the problem isn’t in the models themselves, but in the inputs. What if the math is right, but the models are reflecting reality imperfectly? What if a flaw in the models’ descriptions of nature is the source of the disconnect? I’ve been making a list of the researchers we can introduce Selai to.”

  “The earth system is a big haystack in which to find a needle,” said Galang.

  “Which is why she’ll need all the help she can get,” said Zia.

  “I have a serious question,” said Galang.

  “Yes?”

  “When do you sleep, woman?!”

  Zia laughed. “Who needs sleep when things need doing?”

  “You crazy,” said Galang, shaking his head. “I require all the beauty sleep a man can get.”

  “I just can’t stand the feeling of surplus bandwidth,” said Zia, a brittle truth. “If my job isn’t all-consuming, why am I doing it?”

  “As the coach I never had would have said: leave it all on the field, or don’t play,” said Galang. “I guess your work does have its upsides, though. I get to see you, Aafreen, Kodjo, Daniela, Vachan, Selai, Li Jie, and the rest whenever a story takes me to the right place. It’s always like this, a brief opportunity for catch-up. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the group chat you set up, we would all have fallen out of touch with each other. But you’ve spent months at a time with each of them at various points over the years.”

  “Directing disaster response in their respective countries isn’t exactly the kind of bonding opportunity any of us are looking for,” she said. Typhoons. Fires. Floods. Droughts. Ecosystem collapse. This was the montage Galang wanted screenwriters to dramatize.

  Galang shrugged. “Well, I’m only here because of corrupt assholes, so take what you can get, I guess.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “How’s this particular catastrophe treating you? I was hacking up a lung from all the dust on the way out here from the airport. And the lines out of your supply station are insane.”

  Zia winced. “That dust is topsoil lost to wind erosion. This region is an agricultural breadbasket, but it’s been three years since the last real monsoon. Crop failure. Bankruptcy. Malnutrition. We’re focused on distributing supplies to the needy and teaching dryland techniques to farmers so that India doesn’t turn into a Dust Bowl.”

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Zia hesitated.

  Galang narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

  “It’s just…”

  “Yes?”

  She thought of Himmat. Of Selai. Of paint, peeling. She hadn’t meant to bring this up, hadn’t even really admitted it to herself. But Galang had this way of drawing her out. For all his little jokes, he was a good listener. That, more than anything, was what made him such a great reporter.

  “I started doing this work after my mom died,” said Zia, stumbling over the words as she tried to navigate a slew of muddled feelings. “After the funeral… I just couldn’t imagine dedicating my life to diplomatic cocktail parties, you know? Better to wade directly into the fray, serve the powerless and save the day. Basically, how all twenty-three-year-olds get into humanitarian aid.” Her laugh rang hollow. “If I couldn’t bring back my mom, maybe I could rescue others from similar fates. The disasters I’ve responded to are bad, but thank God we haven’t had anything anywhere near the scale of the Heat Wave.”

  Galang reached across the table and put his hand on hers, which further constricted her already tight throat. She took a steadying breath, then continued. “After responding to natural disaster after natural disaster you eventually start to realize that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. There are only human disasters revealed by nature.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When New Orleans is destroyed and rebuilt again and again, is that a failure of the Army Corps of Engineers, or is it the inevitable result of trying to build a coastal city below sea level? When that earthquake hit Ecuador, every death could have been prevented with better building codes. Those wildfires in British Columbia wouldn’t have been so destructive without decades of counterproductive fire suppression. I mean, look at the story you’re working on. How much less screwed would most Maldivians be if their own government wasn’t trying to profit from tragedy? The real disasters are poverty and shortsightedness. Systemic injustice turns the disadvantaged into human shields against the brute force of nature pursuing its normal course. We create victims, and then we congratulate ourselves when we show them small mercies.”

  “You got out of politics only to realize
that the real challenge of humanitarian aid is… politics.”

  “Exactly!” It was as if the scab Zia had been covertly scratching had finally fallen away. She tapped a finger on the table. “Right here, the people suffering the most are the poor farmers who had no savings or other skillsets to rely on. I come in with my team and treat the symptoms without ever getting close to affecting the real cause. And what makes it even worse is that people resent us. Nobody wants to be a victim. And the people with real power, the power to make a difference, they hate the fact that they need foreign help. My personal political toxicity prevents me from making progress toward any longer-term solutions. Most of the officials I deal with are looking for an excuse to fire me, so I wind up running air cover to give my own people the space they need to get anything done at all.”

  “Have you asked Vachan whether he knows anyone in Delhi who could help?”

  Zia pressed her lips together into a tight line.

  “Oh right, of course not, because you’re Zia.”

  “Isn’t it bad form for journalists to pass judgement?”

  “Is that what I am to you? Just a journalist?” Galang shook his head and donned a mask of ridiculously overdramatic pain. “Would just a journalist have brought you Zachary’s?”

  Zia laughed. “So you do bribe people for scoops!”

  “If it’s any consolation as you cross your existential Rubicon, I’ve been trying to ford a similar stream,” said Galang. “I work my butt off exposing the wrongdoings of some politician or CEO and then when the scandal fades, some other jerk takes their place and the whole cycle starts all over again. It’s like I’m on a treadmill powered by the dark side of human nature. Bonnie, my editor, says I need to chill out and come to terms with the fact that journalism is and always has been a Sisyphean task suited only for workaholic attention seekers with guilt issues.” Galang heaved a sigh. “Sometimes I wonder whether my heart’s still in it. Will I ever write a story that makes a real difference?”

  “Well, you’ve won a couple of Pulitzers.”

  “Which makes it all the more maddening. Every aspiring reporter puts you up on a pedestal and thinks you’ve got some secret sauce that they just want a taste of and I’m all like, My secret sauce tastes a hell of a lot like self-loathing.”