Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “Because there’s no woods left,” Micah said flatly.

  “Come on. I know the shit’s bad, global warming and all, but—”

  “Listen, it’s gone,” she said. “It’s all claimed. It’s all surveyed. There is no wilderness left.”

  “Okay, but what I’m saying is, listen, I just come off a three-thousand-mile bus ride, right? And I was staring at a whole lot of empty . . .”

  “And all of it’s on someone’s schedule for drilling or developing or irrigating or whatever. They’re just the last few remaining puzzle pieces that haven’t been fitted yet—”

  “Parks?” Matty squeaked, and Talmadge could see he was now just fighting to fight.

  “The so-called wilderness areas that the government sets aside,” Micah said coolly, “are like elephants in a circus. You know, with their legs shackled in irons, performing tricks for the crowds. They’re no more natural than that. They’re managed, they’re groomed, they’re scenery, set dressing. Look, my daddy tried that, living off the grid. Bless his fool heart, he’s still trying. But he’d be the first to tell you, there is no off the grid. Not anymore. The grid reaches everywhere. Tell some Eskimo woman in, like, the most remote regions of the Arctic that she’s living off the grid, and you know what she could say? She could ask you why her breastmilk is contaminated with crisis levels of PCBs. Okay? Go out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The very middle, as far from any land as you can get. And you know what’s there? A floating garbage patch that’s nearly the size of Africa. One hundred million tons of debris. So tell me where the grid ends. Show me the city limits sign of civilization.”

  “You’re kinda freaking me out,” Matty said. He was surrendering, Talmadge saw. Micah was beating him down. Or was she cornering him?

  At this Micah grinned, and, seeing the curl of that smile, Talmadge exhaled for what seemed the first time in minutes. “Good,” she said softly. “If the world isn’t freaking you out, you’re not paying attention. And what’s everybody doing about it? Changing their lightbulbs.”

  “While the, uh, polar bears are dying,” Matty snorted agreeably.

  “Yeah, right, but it’s not about polar bears.” Matty was taking her side, Talmadge noted, but she wasn’t letting him off that easily. “I mean, no offense to polar bears, but if people think it’s just about polar bears then they won’t even change the stupid lightbulbs. That’s what the system needs you to think. Look, you know how genocide works, right? The leaders convince people that certain other people are different. That they’re the other, right? Like the indigenous peoples, all over the world. They’re so different, primitive, barbaric, evil, whatever, that we can kill them. Should kill them. That’s how they get wars to work. But the whole polar bear thing is like, like the flip side of that. I mean, the polar bears are just one example, but it’s like . . . they’re the other. But what I mean about the flip side is that instead of being the enemy, they’re the victims. But they’re still the other, get it? And it’s the same deal. The more we separate ourselves from them, the more we say it’s about them, the less we understand that there is no other. And the less we understand that everything we’re doing to them, we’re also doing to us.”

  “Right,” Matty said.

  But Micah was like a spring that, while released, had more uncoiling to do, more energy to expend. “That drug, civilization? It requires more than destroying the planet. It requires that we destroy ourselves, too, with, like, murder and rape and war and genocide and by burying ourselves alive in waste. But that’s just the surface wounds, understand? There are deeper wounds. Have you ever seen a chicken farm?”

  Matty shook his head.

  “They keep the chickens hunched over all the time so that their breasts overdevelop,” Micah said. “They snip off their beaks because if they don’t the chickens will rip each other apart from the stress. They use artificial lighting to disrupt the daily cycle so that the chickens eat as much as possible, all the time. They pipe in, like, elevator music to keep the chickens from rioting. They pump them with massive amounts of antibiotics because without them, in those artificial, like, circumstances, the chickens will die. But a lot of them die anyway from this thing called ascites. That’s when the heart and lungs can’t keep up with the rapid growth rate. The chickens grow themselves to death, right? Too much too fast.”

  Matty, who had happily scarfed down a KFC three-piece dinner in Grand Junction, Colorado, while the bus was refueling, stared at her, unfazed. He wasn’t getting the chicken talk.

  “Poor chickens, right?” she said.

  He nodded, thinking tasty chickens, too.

  “There’s good people who want to change all that, make it more humane,” she said.

  “Cool,” Matty said.

  “But they’re not seeing the bigger picture. Almost everything that’s happening to those chickens is happening to us. The natural world can’t sustain us anymore, so we’ve resorted to all these artificial means to keep the system working, to keep it from collapsing. I mean, it all lines up, when you think about it, even the freaking breastmeat fixation. The only difference is that the chickens get eaten at the end. We get pumped with toxins and stuffed into a steel box. But that’s it, get it? You see what I’m saying, man? The chickens aren’t the other. They’re us. We’re all locked in this system together. We’re not in wire cages but they call it the grid anyway. We’re even losing our ability to think, our, like, primal ability, but it doesn’t matter because they’re pumping us with synthetic drugs designed to make us content to, to not even try. Antidepressants, ADD medications, whatever. Just take a pill and change the lightbulbs, right? That’s the prescription. That’ll make everything all right. Just keep smiling and buying.”

  Micah was almost startled, when she looked up, by the rapt, unblinking stares she was fielding from Talmadge and Matty, as if she hadn’t known these thoughts of hers were being channeled through her vocal cords. She hadn’t even registered Matty’s responses.

  Foggily, she said, “What was the question again?” This was a standard laughline for verbose after-dinner speakers who’d lost their trail of thought, but there was no mirth in it—Micah’s expression was funereal, earnest. Waiting, Matty and Talmadge said nothing.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, nodding, reentering the world from what her father called “the sermon current”—the powerful tide that seems to lift and carry a preacher away from his congregation and into some sacred subliminal wormhole. “Why we do this, right? That’s why. That’s why. I don’t want to smile and buy. We need to weep, and scream, and . . . fucking resist, man. The whole thing is rigged,” she said, and looking to Talmadge, she added, “And we’re not playing.”

  For a long absorptive while they were silent. “Shit,” Matty finally said, as he lit another cigarette, the clicks from his failing lighter sounding like the hammerings of a spent pistol. “You guys are fucking serious. That’s cool.” Looking around the room, he added, “I could get into this.” Only then, as Talmadge and Micah followed his gaze, noting the orange fire-nub of the cigarette glowing like the first star emerging in the dusk sky, did they all realize how dark the room had become.

  Talmadge snatched the lighter and aimed it—with a grip trembling from love and something like missionary zeal, a religious euphoria—at a candle. He struggled to suppress the smile his mouth was forming, which struck him as inappropriate, boyish, selfish; unable to stifle it, however, he covered his mouth with a hand, as if thoughtfully rubbing his beard. “I could get into this,” Matty had said. Here was his past, aligning with his future. Here was a wholeness: a mission, a woman, perhaps now a comrade. Though their companionship had been brief, Matty was Talmadge’s only durable friend; everyone else he’d abandoned, as their lives had calcified (in Talmadge’s view) and his had swelled and flowered. He chided himself for having worried about Matty and Micah: about the whiskey, Matty’s cynicism. Here they were, only a couple of hours into their reunion, and Micah—sweet holy Micah—had alread
y converted him, or at least neutralized any of the expected wariness, the harsh volley of what-the-fucks. Something about the power of three: They’d been alone for so long, he and Micah. In that time they’d learned things, understood things, broken code after code. There was satisfaction, Talmadge realized, in passing it on, in widening the circle. It felt good to come down from the mountain, to be human again. In the yellow candlelight everything felt ancient and true, and the world outside, as for the earliest Christians huddled in their desert caves, debased yet redeemable.

  Talmadge yearned to say as much—to declare something, to translate these feelings into language, language that would rouse them to action, to crash gates, storm trenches—but there were no words in his mind; only a warm radiant blur of emotion. Yet the silence was overripe, he felt; the moment needed seizing.

  But Matty beat him to it. “How’s that pie coming?” he said, causing Micah to leap up, “Oh shit,” and flee into the kitchen. Talmadge watched Matty take a long, hard swig of whiskey, sucking on the bottle harshly and sloppily, the way old movie villains kissed resistant damsels—and then, unless Talmadge was mistaken, wink at him. But no, Talmadge decided, that mustn’t have been a wink. Just smoke in Matty’s eyes, or a trick of the shimmering candlelight. “She’s some’n, huh?” he said to Matty, who replied with a thumbs-up and a crooked, inscrutable grin.

  5

  THE MEMORY OF THE DEER was still imprinted upon Elwin’s spine as he slid a two-drawer steel file cabinet out of the rear hatch of his loaner car, which he’d parked beside a snowbank on Henry Street in lower Manhattan. Objecting to this new burden, his spine telegraphed a complaint that went buzzing from his dorsal horn to his thalamus before being expelled as a loud, emphatic grunt made briefly visible by the cold air. Elwin paused, with the cabinet half discharged, and scanned the sidewalk for—for—for what he didn’t know. Help, advice, maybe an unattended forklift. Or maybe some drowsy vagrant with a WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign pitched upon his lap, because Elwin had the goods for a fair deal: Haul this cabinet across the street to the Roth Residence, that big old cranky-looking building right there, take it to room 109, the door’s marked CROSS, and there’s a plate of seared venison medallions in it for you. Medium rare, and glazed with a cranberry–port wine sauce. Peas and onions, too, and buttered carrots just like my mother used to make, back when she was—

  But there were no drowsy vagrants. Only some kids, underdressed for the weather, making choppy snowballs and pitching them, violently, at a chain-link fence. From his brain’s amygdala, this time, came another message, this one more diffuse, darkening his mind the way an octopus’s ink clouds the sea: There’s no one out there. You’re alone as ever, bucko. This message—a familiar one—he expelled as a dim sigh. The file cabinet hit the street with a sharp clank.

  The loaner car was a painfully small, egg-shaped domestic model for which he’d traded his Jeep at a body shop on Route 24—permanently, as it turned out. “I see my new ad brought you in,” said the owner, referring (he had to explain this to Elwin) to a dead buck splayed on the roadside, just beneath the body shop sign. “Found that one here this morning. I should hang him up with a banner saying DEER COLLISION EXPERTS.” His name was Sal, according to the blue patch on his shirt. Elwin had found him eating a footlong meatball sub at nine-thirty in the morning, a mildly impressive feat; faint whorls of tomato sauce spotted all the paperwork. Classical music was emanating from a conspicuously high-tech stereo system in the corner—and not just any classical music, Elwin noted: not the philharmonic Quaaludes you heard on public radio stations, but something jarringly avant-garde, Luciano Berio or somesuch. When Elwin complimented the soundtrack, however, Sal glanced back at the stereo as if he’d never noticed it before, shrugged, and dusted the hoagie-roll crumbs off the paperwork before sliding it toward Elwin.

  “Been a crazy fucking month,” he’d said. “Hunnerd and fifty deer collisions already. Fucking suicide bombers, how they’re acting.” The worst-case scenario, he said, was two weeks in the loaner car; “unfuckingbelievable” was how Sal characterized his backlog. Rightfully concerned about the seating capacity of the little loaner—several years earlier he’d been ejected from a roller coaster because the safety bar couldn’t fit over his belly, causing his young niece to perish from terminal embarrassment—Elwin asked if there might be a larger vehicle . . . something with more “trunk space,” he said. Bearing width issues of his own, Sal saw right through the ruse; looking Elwin up and down, he said, “Tight squeeze but you’ll be okay.”

  But then Sal had called him three hours later. “Your insurance company put the ixnay on the repair,” he told Elwin. “They wanna total it out.”

  “Total it out?” Elwin squawked. “It’s just some front-end damage!”

  “On a ’98 model, buddy,” said Sal, a funereal cello sonata playing loudly in the background. “Your guys, see, they go by the fifty-one percent rule. If the repair cost tops fifty-one percent of the Blue Book value, she’s a goner. Totaled. Finito. Kaput-ski.”

  “How can it be totaled? I drove it to you.”

  “Talk to your agent. I’m just repeating the news, okay?”

  “I love that Jeep,” Elwin said.

  “Love is cheap,” Sal advised. “Come back at me after the holiday, okay? I’m up to my fucking earballs.”

  The file cabinet, salvaged from the Trueblood Center’s basement, was a gift to his father, though as with all gifts self-interest played a supporting role: Elwin couldn’t bear his father’s room any longer, piled as it was with the elder Cross’s research for the book he was trying to finish, or what Elwin’s sister Jane, rolling her eyes and squiggling her hooked fingers to make air quotes, called his “research.” Four-foot-tall stacks in the corners; precarious-looking piles on the windowsill, on the nightstand, the dresser; and a disheveled tower of manila file folders that had recently bloomed on the room’s single chair, forcing Elwin, on his last visit, to commandeer another chair from the room across the hall. Before all this—the swift mental skid and subsequent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease that had landed Elwin Cross Sr. in this nursing home—Elwin’s father had been painstakingly neat, a model of chilly organization. His three children had been born two years apart, and their heights, as adults, were precisely two inches apart; even his DNA was well-ordered. “He’d alphabetize the ties in his closet if he could only figure out how,” Elwin’s mother used to say. But now he’d grown slipshod, with everything out of place—his files, his glasses, his memories, his semantic processing, his brain’s crudded neurons. He was like a carpenter whose constant misplacing of his hammer limited him to pounding no more than a dozen nails a day, the bulk of his energies directed toward searching. Owing to this, Jane thought it cruel to encourage his writing. “How is he capable of finishing a book when he can’t remember Mom died?” she’d told Elwin. “It’s not fair to egg him on. And, Jesus, that room. He can’t look anywhere without it staring him in the face. It’s just wrong. It’s like sticking him in a maze that doesn’t have an exit. I mean, it even looks like a maze in there.”

  So Elwin had engineered a compromise. As the middle child, that had always been his role: the Henry Clay of the Crosses. The file cabinet he was now lugging across Henry Street would ease some of the clutter—open the maze, at the very least—and buy his father some time, though it wouldn’t assuage Jane’s fears (or cold suspicion) that their father would be eaten by silverfish long before the Alzheimer’s could claim him. When he’d returned home from California, three years before, Elwin had thought the reason was to protect his father from the disease—a security detail that he partially blamed for the demise of his marriage. (Maura had been content, if never giddy, in the L.A. suburbs. The dutiful move to New Jersey, and the acid it generated within her, had thrown the marriage’s fragile pH level off kilter.) More and more, however, he felt as if he was protecting his father from Jane’s various acids.

  Even as a teenager, tilting against his father for all the standa
rd reasons, he’d never quite comprehended his sister’s hot animosity toward their father, admittedly a tyrant though of the classic benevolent order. That she could sustain the animosity now—no matter how she tried to frame it as “realism” versus Elwin’s presumed idealism—was an even darker mystery. “Is it possible that Jane is just, deep down, an asshole?” their younger brother, David, had emailed Elwin from a remote village in China, where he taught basic English while struggling to gestate a novel that, after twenty-plus years, was verging on the mythical. But then David, who was curiously alone in christening himself the family’s “black sheep,” came equipped with his own set of complications; distance, in this case, did not equal objectivity. He’d seemed to covertly relish the fact that Jane’s third husband, a Tribeca anesthesiologist, had more or less wiped out their father’s retirement savings by handing them over to Lawrence Muntner, whose arrest and conviction for operating a gargantuan Ponzi scheme had dominated newscasts a year and a half earlier. Maybe it assuaged some guilt David was feeling for contributing nothing to their father’s care; Elwin didn’t know. Elwin was sanguine about David’s absence in the financial schema, however. His little brother’s bohemian act—which at this late stage was no longer an act—exempted him, in Elwin’s mind, and to a lesser though still surprising degree in Jane’s. Though, “when that book of his gets made into a movie,” she’d said, “we’re socking him with a big fat bill. Interest included.”

  Noting Elwin’s struggles to reconcile his load with the building’s double set of entrance doors—the exterior of which bore the phrase “A LIFE FULFILLMENT COMMUNITY”—a familiar male nurse helped him carry the cabinet to his father’s room. “Special delivery,” the nurse announced, visibly startling Elwin Cross Sr., who was propped up in his bed examining an envelope. The elder Cross frowned at the file cabinet. “What’s that for?” he said.