Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Our ride is here,” Kees calls, shaking my shoulder, and I realize that everyone’s hurriedly collecting laptops and flash drives. There’s a tumult heading up the stairs to the roof and the roar of the wind every time the door’s opened, and the scrabbling sounds of people dragging something outside before the door slams shut. And then, with surprising abruptness, it’s quiet.

  My window continues to shake as though it’s not double-pane but cellophane. Now that our land has subsided as much as it has, when the water does come, it will come like a wall, and each dike that stops it will force it to turn, and in its churning, it will begin to spiral and bore into the earth, eroding away the dike walls, until the pressure builds and that dike collapses and it’s on to the next one, with more pressure piling up behind, and so on and so on until every last barrier falls and the water thunders forward like a hand sweeping everything from the table.

  The lights go off, and then on and off again, before the halogen emergency lights in the corridors engage, with their irritated buzzing.

  It’s easier to see out with the interior lights gone. Along the line of cars, a man carrying a framed painting staggers at an angle, like a sailboat tacking. He passes a woman in a van with her head against the headrest and her mouth open in an Oh of fatigue.

  I’m imagining the helicopter crew’s negotiations with my mother, and their fireman’s carry once those negotiations have fallen through. She told me once that she often recalled how long they drifted in the flood of 1953 through the darkness without the sky getting any lighter. When the sun finally rose, they watched the Navy drop food and blankets and rubber boats and bottles of cooking gas to people on roofs or isolated high spots, and when their boat passed a small body lying across an eave with its arms in the water, her father told her that it was resting. She remembered later that morning telling her mother, who’d grown calmer, that it was a good sign they saw so few people floating, and before her father could stop her, she answered that the drowned didn’t float straightaway but took a few days to come up.

  And she talked with fondness about how tenderly her father had tended to her later, after she’d been blinded by some windblown grit, by suggesting she rub one eye to make the other weep, like farmers did when bothered by chaff. And she remembered, too, the strangeness of one of the prayers her village priest recited once they were back in their old church, the masonry buttressed with steel beams and planking to keep the walls from sagging outwards any further: I sink into deep mire, where there is no standing; I come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

  The window’s immense pane shudders and flexes before me from the force of what’s pouring out of the North Sea. Water’s beginning to run its fingers under the seal on the sash. Cato will send me wry and brisk and newsy text updates whether she receives answers or not, and Henk will author a few as well. Everyone in Berlin will track the developments on the monitors above them while they shop or travel or work, the teaser heading reading something like THE NETHERLANDS UNDER SIEGE. Some of the more sober will think, That could have been us. Some of the more perceptive will consider that it soon might well be.

  My finger’s on the Cato icon on the screen without exerting the additional pressure that would initiate another call. What sort of person ends up with someone like me? What sort of person finds that acceptable, year to year? We went on vacations and fielded each other’s calls and took turns reading Henk to sleep and let slip away the miracle that was there between us when we first came together. We hunkered down before the wind picked up. We modeled risk management for our son when instead, we could have embraced the freefall of that astonishing Here, this is yours to hold. We told each other I think I know when we should’ve said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.

  Cato was moved by my mother’s flood memories but brought to tears only by the one she cherished from that year: the Queen’s address to the nation afterwards, her celebration of what the crucible of the disaster had produced, and the return, at long last, of the unity the country had displayed during the war. My mother had years ago purchased a vinyl record of the speech, and later had a neighbor transfer it to a digital format. She played it once while we were visiting, and Henk knelt at the window spying on whoever was hurrying by. And my mother held the weeping Cato’s hand and she held mine and Henk gave us fair warning of anything of interest on the street, while the Queen’s warm and smooth voice thanked us all for working together in that one great cause, soldiering on without a thought for care, or grief, or inner divisions, and without even realizing what we were denying ourselves.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JIM SHEPARD is the author of six novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, and four story collections, including You Think That’s Bad. His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His novel Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program, and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen Shepard, his three children, and two beagles.

  THE PRECEDENT

  SEAN McMULLEN

  Even when the climate crime is so serious that death is not punishment enough, one still gets an audit. We were being taken to a mine in the desert to be audited, and a third of the tippers who had begun the journey had already died. Their bodies had been staked out by the roadside to desiccate. We pulled wagons that were loaded with our water and food, wagons that were SUVs stripped of their engines, doors, and seats. No fuel resources could be consumed on our journey.

  There was no clear pattern to the deaths in our grisly and geriatric column. Some fat tippers died within the first ten miles, but others just got thinner and survived. I was quite fit to begin with, so I was better prepared than most. Red sand made the ground look red-hot and magnified my unending thirst. The surface of the road was appalling, but nobody tried to repair it. A good road would make it easier for us, and we were meant to be stressed. If some of us died, so much the better.

  In the Midsouth Consolidation, they practiced desiccation. Once dead, the tippers were flayed open and left to dry in the sun. When there was only bone and dried flesh left, their remains were brought to the mines and buried. Thus the carbon of the guilty was returned to the Earth, rather than stressing the atmosphere.

  * * * *

  At nightfall, we stopped where we were, shuffled to the roadside, and fell asleep. Each night, I had the same visitor. He was just a denser patch of darkness in the gloom with a pale oval for a face, yet his voice was perfectly clear.

  “So you survived to the mine,” he said.

  “Not there yet,” I replied, sitting up.

  “You arrive tomorrow. The odds favor you.”

  “You talk as if this is good.”

  “What is wrong with being alive?”

  “It’s 2035 and vengeance is upon us; is that good? We tippers were born before the Millennium Year and so are guilty until pardoned. Is that good? I was born in 1955, so I’m guilty. For me, that’s bad.”

  “You could plead guilty, then appeal for a merciful death.”

  “I intend to beat the audit.”

  “The Audit of Midsouth has a perfect record for tipper convictions.”

  “I’m used to standing alone.”

  * * * *

  Those of us who reached the mine had to camp in a vast holding ground of red sand, awaiting our turn to be audited. Some had been there a long time. These were the borderlines, those tippers who had difficult audits and were holdi
ng up the executions. Every execution meant a lessening of the burden on the ecosphere, so large numbers were important. Meantime, the borderlines were assigned to service, where they did the flaying, the desiccation, and the dropping of bodies down the mine shaft.

  The miners were too guilty to die. They were lowered into the mine, there to live out what remained of their lives dragging corpses away from the drop shaft and packing them into the abandoned tunnels. Miners first class had no light; their only food was what they could gnaw from the corpses, and they had to drink the artesian water that seeped into the tunnels. It was a poor alternative to death.

  Because those pending audit were already considered guilty, we were made to assist with disposals after executions. This began the day we arrived. Hot, parched, weary, and coated with red dust, we simply dropped our harnesses and joined the execution parade. The first convicted man was my age, and I was eighty. The executioner had been chosen by ballot from the pool of Wardens. She was about twenty and was lean and muscular. Her recreation was probably fitness, which was very climatically correct.

  “What’s your charges?” asked an older borderline as we shuffled along.

  “Squandering and display,” I replied mechanically.

  “Yeah? Me, I got greed. The audit went for death, second class, but I got adjourned. Name’s Chaz.”

  “I’m Jason; my audit’s tomorrow.”

  The Wardens did not care if we tippers talked among ourselves. What we said was no longer important to anyone but us. The condemned man was walking with his hands tied behind his back. He turned as he heard us.

  “I got denial, squandering, and greed,” he announced proudly. “Death, second class on all three.”

  “What was your line?” I asked.

  “Morels.”

  “As in the mushrooms?”

  “Yeah, and I was good, too. Hunted them for a living back in the States. I just loved the wilderness. Used to teach folk the tricks, like how to get ‘eyes on’ in snow and burned pine forest, then to look for the ‘pop-out’ effect. That’s when the morels suddenly start jumping out at you.”

  I was to hear that sort of spiel depressingly often in the fortnight to come. Tippers often tried to leave a little of their art or passion to those who might survive them. How to tune a motor, ways to score in a nightclub, tricks to beat the trend in a share market, or even the art of arranging Christmas lights. But there were no more gasoline motors, nightclubs and share markets had ceased to exist, and proof that you had ever displayed Christmas lights would get you death, second class.

  “How does a mushroom hunter get denial, squandering, and greed?” asked Chaz.

  “I drove an SUV to reach the best spots.”

  Denial, because he said he loved the wilderness yet drove an SUV. Squandering, merely because he drove an SUV. Greed, because he took from nature without giving back. Death, death, and death. Having spoken, he looked more relaxed, perhaps because he had left something of himself in our memories. Shepherded by the executioner, he walked out onto the tipping plank. The gallows were built of timber even though the old mine site was littered with steel pipes and beams. That was climatic symbolism. The Auditor General stood waiting.

  “James Francis Harrington, you have been found guilty of denial, squandering, and greed,” she declared. “For this you are sentenced to death by merciful means. As you did take from the Earth, so now you must give what remains to you back to the Earth. This by my tally, the twenty-fifth day of March, 2035. Wardens, reclaim his carbon.”

  The executioner arranged the noose to snap Harrington’s neck as he stood on the tipping plank. This was a length of pinewood that extended out over the drop. The other end was held down by a pile of coal. Now a procession of Wardens filed past. Each took a lump of coal from the pile. The plank began to teeter. I counted fifteen seconds of teetering, during which Harrington’s dignity and composure fled. He began to scream as the tipping point approached; he pissed his pants to try to lighten himself and gain a few more moments of life.

  Relentlessly, the hands removed coal from the pile, as relentlessly as coal had once been dug out of the Earth and burned. Abruptly, the tipping point was reached, and a shower of coal catapulted over Harrington as he fell. The gallows creaked. The Wardens applauded.

  “Now, that was a great piece of work,” said Chaz. “Harrington didn’t want to give the scream of repentance, but they got it out of him.”

  A long line of condemned tippers was waiting as we took the body down. A woman began to shriek and struggle. She was next. Her executioner was a youth of about seventeen, and he looked nervous. Nervous about killing someone, or nervous about screwing up? The Wardens collected the coal and piled it back onto the tipping plank.

  The executions went on for a long time. The lumps of coal became coated with red sand, so that they seemed to glow hot. I was made to brush them, to keep the symbolism clear.

  “So, what were you?” asked one of the few friendly Wardens as we were finally led away.

  “I was a climatologist,” I replied.

  “A climate change denialist?” she gasped, as if I had just admitted to being the devil himself.

  “No, a climate scientist. I was actually one of the first to warn about climate change, back in the 1980s.”

  She thought about this for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Why would a climatologist get audited?” she asked.

  “Every tipper gets audited,” I replied.

  This was the flaw that underlay the World Audit. Was any tipper innocent? Up to a point, the answer was easy. Everyone who had squandered resources for recreation or greed was guilty, but what about those who burned fossil fuels for a living? Not quite so clear, because these included cab drivers, airline pilots, and the like. Such cases were adjourned, but the backlog of marginal offenders was becoming quite a burden worldwide. Just what did make a tipper a climate criminal? A standard was needed.

  “What was your line?” I asked the Warden.

  “Name’s Olivia; wanna do some climatically correct recreational sex?”

  I put a hand to my face and shook my head.

  “I meant your job before you became a Warden.”

  “Computers, systems administration. Then I got audited.”

  She lifted her kilt to show the brand on one thigh: S for squandering.

  “It hurt like hell, but I deserved it.”

  I noticed Chaz staring at her thigh with as much admiration as someone in his seventies could manage.

  “To me, that’s squandering a mighty fine leg,” he said, and the three of us laughed.

  Sometimes, survival was who you knew, and Chaz went out of his way to be liked by the right people.

  “Not many tippers beat the audit,” I said.

  “I was born in 2001, so I’m not a tipper,” she explained.

  “Ah, a victim.”

  “Yeah. We get leniency for climate crimes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was two-sixty pounds back in 2023; can you believe it?”

  “And you got squandering, not gluttony?”

  “I wasn’t greedy, just a slob living on Coke, turkey stuffing, and fries. Now I’m under one-thirty pounds. That’s why I got just branded, second class. I was lucky. The Retributor wanted service, first class.”

  * * * *

  That night, I lay on my back, looking at the stars and thinking about how rapidly the world had changed. The victim riots had caught the authorities by surprise, but trends could grow exponentially thanks to the Internet. Going lateral was another movement that began on the Internet. The lateralists worked out that they could actually live way better by detaching themselves from the economic systems of derivatives, leverage, optionality, and toxic assets. In just months, the lateralists’ ranks swelled from thousands to millions to hundreds of millions. This generated a crisis in confidence that triggered the biggest financial collapse in history, and very soon, the people who had formerly worked at ge
nerating meaningless wealth were out looking for real jobs. By then, it was too late because the climate was severely screwed, there were famines in Western democracies, the trillions of dollars based on derivatives and options were fast becoming meaningless, and economic growth was considered about as healthy as cancer.

  Democracies did particularly badly against lateralism, because their politicians were working to very short agendas. They did nothing decisive to save the ecosphere, as everything had to be balanced to appease competing interests. Lateralism ignored wealth. Soon, there were only guards, goods, and obscenely rich people left in conventional economies. Dictatorships did not last long when entire populations became lateralist terrorists. What did citizens have to lose? They were starving and the world seemed to be ending, anyway. As the surviving nobles of Europe found out when the Black Death swept across their estates in the fourteenth century, however, you need peons as the foundation of any economy.

  “You summoned me?” asked a familiar voice.

  “I never summon you,” I muttered.

  “Of course you do. Enjoying the night sky?”

  “The end of the world is close; the sky is all that’s worth looking at.”

  “Not the end of the world, but your world,” said my visitor. “The world will go on, but your world has been unsustainable for a long time.”

  “Funny, I thought the police and armies would hold things together for longer,” I admitted.

  “The World Audit promised order and organization, so the police and soldiers signed up very quickly. They annihilated the armed urban gangs and survivalist warlords. That earned a lot of support, almost as much as auditing and executing the rich.”

  “So, Death is an Auditor?”

  “No, but an Auditor is Death.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It will, soon.”

  The most annoying thing about Death was that I kept catching myself agreeing with him. We seemed to have a lot in common. Did he want to be friends? I drifted into a proper sleep.