Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  The village had no water source of its own. The women were forced to walk twenty miles for water to the nearest river, which was regularly patrolled by vigilantes and thieves. Many of the women were either injured or harmed along the journey, or beaten and raped at the river. The new spring promised to quench the thirst of the village and end the perilous pilgrimage for water.

  The village priest wrote to Rome. Bishop Carlo Devicchio was sent to Somalia to investigate.

  “No doubt Rasima Rasima beat the bishop to the scene,” Thomas A. Rhett writes. “How else could she be sure that the young girl knew it was Sister Marilee Lorenzo she had seen in the copse and not some other saint or deity?”

  Rasima Rasima writes in her book:

  I had already been at the village three days when the good bishop finally arrived. I turned over dozens of written testimonies I had gathered from the villagers that I had translated myself. The young girl, whom I had interviewed extensively, told the bishop precisely what she told me: Sister Marilee Lorenzo had shown her the way to the spring.

  In 2031 the Vatican sanctified the miracle, now known in popular culture as the Miracle of the Spring, and the Venerable Marilee Lorenzo was elevated to the status of “Blessed,” one step away from “Saint.”

  The Miracle of the Spring was highly politicized, as 2031 marked the beginning of the Global Water Crisis. Between 2031 and 2034, the price of water around the globe increased hundredfold in urban areas, and became virtually priceless in developing nations. The year 2031 saw the final drop of water siphoned from the Ogallala Aquifer, which had vitalized the American Midwest following the Dust Bowl. In 2033 the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in Northern Africa went dry after nearly two decades of widespread industrial farming. And the final blow came in 2034 when a study by the United Nations reported the disappearance of over two hundred rivers and streams worldwide.

  The global response was frenzied. Many developing countries, deep in debt and lacking the infrastructure to support a national crisis, went to war for water. The superpowers, countries like the United States and China, paid increasingly higher prices for freshwater, and raced to harness unclaimed glacial ice in arctic territories. Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, research continued on the desalinization techniques that had been all but abandoned at the turn of the century in favor of groundwater drilling.

  When the average price of water in the United States nearly centupled in 2034, the American Southwest could no longer afford to support the millions of people who had settled the desert regions of Southern California and Las Vegas. Tinseltown and Sin City fell into economic ruin, and, consequently, Northern California seceded from the south, creating two new states now known as New Shasta and Villanova. The gory details of the split are outlined in historian Paul Elroy’s New York Times best seller, The California Water Crisis of 2034.

  My sisters, who were then living in LA, scattered to all corners of the country, hoping to escape the drought and conflict. My mother, being rich and stubborn, decided to stick it out in Malibu, paying exorbitant prices to maintain the life of country clubs, spas, and lawn parties to which she had grown accustomed. She died in 2046, the same year Matzick Geihzko, a PhD student in Moscow, designed a desalinization method that could convert up to two hundred gallons of seawater to freshwater every second.

  That’s where the water I’m drinking now comes from: one of the Geihzko plants off the coast of Brittany, France. And when I go home to New Shasta, I will draw my water from a Geihzko plant that was once an oil rig off the Santa Barbara coast.

  It’s not cheap. But it’s a start. It’s a start.

  So imagine in 2030, a little girl in northern Somalia discovers a freshwater spring in a dry copse just on the eve of a global water crisis.

  Who wouldn’t call that a miracle?

  CHAPTER 25

  IN PAUL ELROY’S most recent book, The Greater Depression, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2055, he describes the years ensuing the California Water Crisis as “the darkest years since the Dark Ages.”

  They were dark years for me, too, but not for the same reasons as everybody else. I was rich, and rich people could afford to eat and drink and sleep in comfort, even with the world falling apart, even in the Greater Depression.

  Nevertheless, I had my lows like everybody else. For me those dark years saw the deaths of all four of my sisters to heart disease. And then my mother, too, of liver failure.

  That was also about the time the Catholic Church pulled Marilee out of the ground and put her on display in a glass coffin for all the world to see. Standard procedure, they told me, for candidates in line for sainthood.

  Her corpse remained on display in the Grace Cathedral for about a year, and then they asked me if I had any objections to her going to Rome.

  I’d never objected to Marilee going anywhere before. So off Marilee went to Rome, where she remains a major tourist attraction to this day.

  Those were also the years the kids moved away to college: Eliza to Ann Arbor and Spencer to New York City. Only Kendra Ann stayed in San Francisco, but the SF Gators had her flying all over the country for basketball games every other weekend.

  Meanwhile, I was all alone in that big house. Except for Greta’s ghost rattling around somewhere in the walls.

  I bought a German shepherd in 2037, the same year Kendra Ann moved out. I named him T-Rex. T-Rex was stolen out of the yard less than a year later. Incidentally, that upset me more than any of my sisters’ deaths. Probably because I knew T-Rex was going to end up a soufflé for some starving family.

  Lots of dogs and cats were being kidnapped for food back in those days.

  “Common household pets had more to fear than anyone,” Elroy writes in The Greater Depression. “The population of house cats dropped fifty-seven percent in the decade following the California Water Crisis. The population of domesticated dogs dropped seventy-two percent.”

  I never ate dog or cat. I didn’t need to. I had money to buy rarities like beef and pork and fish. But the rest of the world was hungry. As a matter of fact, the rest of the world was starving.

  What had happened?

  In 2034, when US farmers already had their hands full with the Global Water Crisis, and when the US government was spending billions of dollars to channel water from the Pacific Northwest to the thirsty states in the Midwest, a new terror struck the breadbasket of America.

  Its official name was Sangoria minoris, but the media called it Fetter’s Rot after the biologist Robert A. Fetter, who was the first to identify the virus. It originated, they think, in Northern California, now New Shasta, around the Sacramento Delta area. And it spread quickly across the Sierras and into the Mississippi River region, and, finally, around the world.

  It affected corn, primarily, and some varieties of wheat and barley. Before the corn or wheat or barley could fully ripen, the stalk would wither and rot, folding over on itself like a lawn chair. This gave the dying vegetable the appearance of a man with his head slumped onto his chest. On a trip down Interstate 5 to visit my mother in 2036, all I could see for miles and miles were the slumped-over silhouettes of what looked like regiments of narcoleptic scarecrows.

  The food industry was devastated. They had spent so many years planting the same old monocultures and GMOs that the crops had become virtually indistinct from one another. There was no stopping Fetter’s Rot from taking out every single one of these vegetal clones in a matter of months.

  Poof goes the world!

  Of course this led to hunger everywhere. Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. A census report showed the world population dipping for the first time since World War Two.

  The sheer scope of Fetter’s Rot is best described in Elroy’s book:

  Among the 198 recognized countries of the world, 197 reported at least one confirmed case of Fetter’s Rot. The only sovereign state to remain unaffected was Vatican City, the only country in the world with no agriculture whatsoever.

  The first to starve to
death were the cows and pigs and chickens and farmed fish, which survived primarily off a diet of corn and grain. No way were they getting dinner while the rest of us starved. Except for a few small ranches with deep pockets, the entire meat-packing industry went ker-plop.

  The cost of meat skyrocketed. Paul Elroy writes, “The US Census reported some fifty-two million vegetarians in the country in 2030. That number ballooned to two hundred fifty million by 2040.”

  Then in 2041, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake leveled South Central Los Angeles. My mother slept through the whole thing. The earthquake lasted forty-eight seconds. My mother was napping on the sofa after a long brunch at the country club, and when she awoke, she found all the glass windows shattered and her swimming pool empty.

  My mother was nearly thirty miles from the epicenter of the quake. Nevertheless, she suffered something like $20,000 in property damage.

  The rest of Los Angeles was decimated. The president of the United States, a man by the name of Stuart Trump, of the Trump family, declared a national emergency, and aid trickled in from whichever countries still had any money or food to spare, namely China.

  In The Greater Depression, Elroy concludes that the Villanova earthquake of 2041 marks the moment that Hollywood got out of Los Angeles for good. Hollywood producers had already moved filming out to Vancouver for the tax breaks. But following the California Water Crisis, and the secession of the North, and then finally the Villanova earthquake of 2041, every major motion picture company hightailed it to Canada, taking all of the glitz and glam of the American Dream with them.

  Every empire must fall.

  But it wasn’t the Villanova earthquake that brought the world to its knees; major cities had suffered natural disasters before. Nor was it the Global Water Crisis, which spiked the cost of water to nearly the price of oil. Those were not the kickers. It was a strain of tiny little microorganisms that seemed to move across the globe like an apocalyptic plague of locusts. Sangoria minoris. Fetter’s Rot.

  Paul Elroy writes, “The world was in a state of emergency. Never in the history of humankind had every corner of the earth been so hungry. Who could come to the rescue now, when everyone on the planet needed rescuing? The best thing, some said, would be to send an SOS to the stars and hope for an alien race to intervene.”

  But it wasn’t an alien race that intervened.

  It was Rowan Krasimir.

  CHAPTER 26

  WHEN THE BIG ONE struck in 2041, Rasima Rasima got her second miracle. She was in New Delhi, at the opening of another Marilee Lorenzo Free Clinic, when news reached her of an 8.9-magnitude earthquake in the heart of South Central Los Angeles.

  “My first concern,” Rasima Rasima writes in her book, “was the safety of the orphaned children of South Gate, a municipality of Los Angeles County where we had just opened an orphanage only a year before and where the earthquake was said to have taken the largest toll. Communications were down, and air traffic was at a standstill. We simply had to sit and wait for news to come over the wire.”

  News came, all right. The city of South Gate had crumbled like the walls of Jericho. Los Angeles had long been famous for its elaborate network of fault lines, which crisscrossed the region like the cracks in a shattered windshield. However, geologists had missed a major thrust fault that coursed through the heart of South Gate like a pulmonary artery. They later called it the Tweedy Fault for its almost perfect alignment with South Gate’s most prominent street, Tweedy Boulevard.

  The Tweedy Fault showed no mercy. Initial reports had the death toll at nearly fifteen thousand, with another twenty thousand still missing. Thirty thousand homes were destroyed in addition to another twenty thousand commercial and municipal buildings. Rescue crews were working around the clock to pull survivors from the wreckage.

  Then news came of a miracle. Amid all the death and destruction, one building had been spared: South Gate’s Marilee Lorenzo Children’s Home. Standing almost directly atop the fault line, the children’s home had taken the brunt of the impact, yet suffered virtually no damage. Helicopter footage showed the children’s home standing perfectly intact amid the wreckage, like a life raft in a churning sea.

  What’s more, reports from inside the building stated no one had been injured or harmed, and that most of the napping children had slept through the quake, just as my eighty-five-year-old mother in Malibu had after a brunch heavy in scotch and tonic.

  The Marilee Lorenzo Children’s Home transferred the children to a temporary facility in Reseda, away from the worst of the destruction. The director of the children’s home then turned the building over to emergency crews, and within twenty-four hours, the children’s home became the beating heart and homestead of the Red Cross efforts.

  It couldn’t have gone more smoothly if Marilee had orchestrated the whole thing herself.

  Rasima Rasima made it out to Los Angeles a week later. She paid a visit to the orphans who had survived unscathed. Then she joined the Red Cross relief efforts. She was, after all, a two-time earthquake veteran.

  Three months later Bishop Carlo Devicchio came out to Los Angeles to see for himself what kind of miracle had occurred there. Then in 2042, the Vatican made my sister a saint—Saint Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco.

  Theological scholar Thomas A. Rhett writes in The Origins of a Saint:

  It would be hard to deny the miraculous nature of the events of South Gate in 2041. The iconic image, circulated in the press, of the perfectly preserved children’s hospital has become an enduring emblem in the Catholic Church of God’s great mercy. However, many critics are quick to point out that the building was less than a year old; it was the most recent construction in South Gate by some twenty years. Consequently, it was equipped with the latest and greatest advances in retrofit technology. So, some ask, miracle of God or miracle of engineering?

  I don’t know how Marilee would answer. But she’d most certainly say it was no miracle of her own.

  Nevertheless, an article in The New York Times recently stated that the papacy plans to assign Saint Marilee Lorenzo patronage over earthquakes.

  Magnum Opus.

  Things in Los Angeles have improved some in the decade since the earthquake, but Villanova is still the most economically unstable state in the union. Repeated efforts to reunite Shasta and Villanova have failed, namely because the North has no interest in shackling itself to the debt and poverty of an economy with nothing to offer.

  No water. No agriculture. Not even a decent Hollywood film every now and then.

  All the good movies come from Canada now.

  So be it.

  Speaking of movies, I just went to see a picture at the Cinéma Gaumont Parnasse on rue d’Odessa. Everything in Paris is screened in its original language with French subtitles, and this particular film was in English. Canadian English.

  Incidentally, the movie was about a writer who stays home all day pumping out crime thrillers. His wife is a lawyer at a big firm, and they have a hunky-dory apple pie relationship with two kids, a dog named Ralph, and a cat named Whiskers.

  Original.

  The writer in the movie has started a new novel about a guy who suspects his wife is cheating on him, and winds up in a twisted game of cat and mouse trying to root out the truth. His protagonist’s name is Peter Holt.

  It’s a story inside a story, you see.

  Now, as the writer gets further along in his story, he starts to notice little oddities in his own life, like an extra key on his wife’s key ring, or a funny smell on her collar, which are precisely the sorts of things the guy in his novel finds suspicious.

  With the kids at school and his wife at work all the time, the writer spends his days alone in his big house, and this starts to drive him a little batty. Between bouts of writing, he starts to wander around the house looking for clues, suspecting, as does the character in his book, that his wife has been unfaithful.

  This goes on for some time, with lots of long shots of the writer staring at a n
ecklace or a ribbon and imagining a handsome stranger putting it on or taking it off.

  The writer begins to suspect his neighbor, a single dad with whom his wife coordinates carpools for the kids, of seducing his wife. The paranoid writer grows hostile toward his wife and their neighbor, believing the two of them to be in on some harebrained conspiracy that mirrors perfectly what Peter Holt is experiencing in the novel.

  The writer starts acting really nutty, but it isn’t until his wife takes a peek at the finished manuscript that she realizes the danger they’re all in. The last line of the novel reads, “In a fit of jealousy and rage, Peter Holt pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.”

  Boom!

  She hears a gunshot from upstairs and rushes in to find the writer dead on the floor with a gun in his mouth.

  The end.

  Pretty morbid stuff. Subsequently, we learn that the wife was never having an affair, even though her husband suspected she was.

  In my experience it works the other way around—the husband never suspected his wife was having an affair, even though she actually was.

  In both stories someone ends up dead.

  The movie was called Everything is Rosé, a reference to the pink stain the writer finds on his wife’s blouse that leads him to suspect her of boozing with another man.

  Incidentally, it was a bottle of rosé that finally warmed Greta up to me so many years ago when we met again in Paris.

  She was a bit of a lightweight, Greta.

  Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. sent me back to Paris in July of 2011. Back then July was the hottest time of the year in Paris. It happens to be July 2056 as I write, and it’s raining outside. That’s normal, they tell me, nowadays.

  I didn’t know if I’d see Greta again, especially after she’d sent some lackey in her place the last time I’d been over. Nevertheless, I came prepared. I had on a pair of tapered slacks, a white button-down, and oxfords. I’d even cut my hair for the occasion, which, as anyone will tell you, is not my favorite thing to do.