Freebird

by John Raymond

  But the flush of revulsion passed quickly. This wasn’t truly evil, she reassured herself. How could evil be born on such a sunny, fragrant, pan-Asian patio, with dulcet water trickling over pebbled concrete fountains? Bad taste could be born here, but evil? Evil was bayoneting babies in front of their mothers. Mark’s silly Enron fantasy was nothing compared with true evil. It was almost a disservice to evil to get too worked up about Mark Harris’s stupid plan.

  And furthermore, if she was really honest with herself, she found the audacity of Mark’s plan kind of refreshing, in a way. Maybe he almost deserved credit for h is absurd, exploitative scheme. It was hypocrisy that she hated most, after all, and he was definitely not a hypocrite—she would give him that much. No, he was more like a dog, utterly simple in his doggish desires, plagued by none of the crabbed self-doubt and fear that thwarted her and her friends’ every will to satisfaction. Once upon a time there had been burly, strapping union men who wanted to own the future in the name of the people. Once upon a time, badass liberals with a fuck-you attitude had walked the earth. That had been the righteous fantasy that had led her into this world of public service in the first place. But those days were long gone now. The representatives of the people had become a bunch of dried-out bureaucrats, wimps modulating the level of damage from their cubicle farms, rounding off the last edges of life. She could at least be honest with a capitalist pig like Mark Harris. He wanted to put his stink on the future. A future that was probably diametrically opposite the one she wanted, but still . . .

  “I can’t sell you the rights to the city’s wastewater,” she told him, with some small pang of regret. “Sorry to disappoint you, Mark. I’m not an elected official. I don’t have that power. I’m not even a lawyer, and it would take a lot of lawyers to do what you’re talking about.”

  “I’ve got lawyers,” he said. “A shit ton of lawyers. And I know you can’t sell it to me yourself, Anne. But who can? That’s what I need to figure out. Who’s got the authority to make this kind of deal?” A sudden, carnivorous interest had entered his voice. So here was the practical question that bedeviled him. Where was the lever he was looking for? Where was the button? Where was the key?

  “I’m not sure,” she said, with some care. “It’d take some figuring out. There are probably a few ways it could go.”

  “Susan?” he asked.

  “No,” Anne said. “It’s more complicated than that. You’d need to build a whole coalition.”

  “The mayor? Most likely the mayor. The mayor would have to sign off.”

  “We’re talking purely theoretically . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “The mayor, yes. You’ll want the mayor’s signature on the document, whatever it is. That would be important. But also the city council. There are fifteen members, and you’d need at least one or two to spearhead it through the vote. If you really wanted the deal to hold up in a court of law, the council would need a say.”

  “Which council members would be the best?”

  “Randy Lowell oversees Sanitation. No way around Randy.”

  “Randy. Yeah.” He seemed to be fitting her words into the larger puzzle in his mind, confirming the shape that had been established before her arrival on the scene. “Randy Lowell. master of the brown, hairy cornwater.” He brooded a moment, then brightened and stood, depositing his napkin in a pile on the table. “Speaking of which. Excuse me a moment. I shall return.”

  She watched Mark Harris’s muscled legs striding across the patio with that telltale jock swagger, the product of a thousand football locker rooms, basketball courts, suburban keggers. He was the enemy, indeed, but she couldn’t even really see him as a full-grown man. She saw him as a little boy, another of her brother’s unruly childhood pals. As a girl, she’d loved those guys, their destructive urges, their immense lack of self-control. She’d loved the way they threw themselves into each other, hurting themselves so happily, and later on how badly, how pathetically, they’d wanted to fuck her. Boys were so simple. They wanted the simplest things. The problems started when they became men. They shed the simple stupidity and became dishonest and conniving. They started lying and hoarding for themselves. Mark Harris might be a horrible, insensitive, wrongheaded person, but he wasn’t ugly in that way, not yet, and she couldn’t help it—she liked him.

  She sighed, thinking about her men. Her father, who’d never been a boy at all, whose boyhood had been stabbed in a ditch. Her son, who was still a boy but on the verge of manhood, and who refused to give her the slightest inkling as to what he was planning to become. He’d turned away from her for now, needing room to incubate the next self. Her brother, who was neither boy nor man but something else. God knew. A wraith. What boyhood song had sent him off to his wars? What had she missed that had led him into that jungle? And what was his deal at dinner that night? She hadn’t seen that little huff coming at all.

  Mark Harris was a funny little boy, and as he came gliding back to her across the patio, sunglasses down, face stony and serious, she was having trouble remembering exactly why she was supposed to hate him so much. Just because he’d been lucky enough to stay a boy all his life? Just because he’d gotten what everyone deserved?

  “This has been a fruitful conversation, Anne Singer,” Mark said, retaking his seat. “I am incredibly thankful that you made the time to meet with me. It’s not every day I get to meet one of my heroes of civic planning.”

  “Ha.”

  “I’m serious, Anne. I wish everyone could understand what you do. We haven’t even talked about the Pomona Green Corridor yet. That was an absolutely incredible win. And it was you who did it. You. I know that for a fact.”

  “Well . . . I wouldn’t exactly . . .”

  “Okay, okay, whatever. You’ve got your modest little worker-bee thing, I get it. You have to. But you and I both know there’s a way bigger picture here. In a different world, well . . . who knows what you might get to do. I’d like to see that myself. I’d like to live in the world where Anne Singer is recognized for what she does. Or, even better, where she’s pushed to do something she didn’t even think she could do. But maybe that’s just my fantasy. I don’t know. In any case, I think we have some interesting agenda items to work on now, don’t you? That’s my take-away from this meeting, anyway. I hope you feel the same way.”

  “Sure, yeah,” she said. “Very interesting.” Withholding herself seemed the only defense against his implacable charm. Unless it was a collaboration with his charm; she wasn’t yet sure.

  “You think I’m joking,” he said, “but I’m quite serious about this idea. And to show you I’m serious, I’d like to make an offer to you. Right now. On the spot. I’m utterly, completely convinced of your intelligence and talent. Are you listening? This is the offer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I want to make you a stakeholder in BHC Industries.”

  “BHC?”

  “Brown, Hairy . . . I think “Cornwater” is one word, right? Cornwater. We’ll assume so. Three initials is better. Anyway. First, I’d like to bring you in as a consultant with BHC Industries. Paid, of course. I’m thinking five thousand a month to start with? We can reassess the numbers in a few months. After you’ve had a chance to put together this coalition you’re talking about. And then, assuming we get some traction on the permit, I want to give you points in the final operation.”

  “The back end, so to speak.”

  “Ha! The back end of BHC. I love it. Yes.”

  “I’m honored, Mark,” she said. “But unfortunately, that would be a blatant conflict of interest for me. So I’ll have to pass.”

  Mark seemed unfazed by her refusal. “How so, conflict of interest?”

  “I work for the city,” she said. “You’re the private sector. That’s like . . .” She bumped her fists together, bouncing them apart like two magnets.

  “Is it illegal, though? You seriously can’t moonlight if you work for the city? You give up all your rights of citiz
enship?”

  “I can’t serve both the public and private interests, no.”

  Mark rubbed his strong chin, affecting thought. “See, that’s something I don’t understand. I don’t understand why the public and private interests are necessarily opposed. Who said that had to be the case?”

  “That’s a whole other conversation, Mark. But believe me, the interests are opposed. If we didn’t oppose you guys, we’d all be living in a parking lot now. We’d be eating infected meat packed with sawdust. We’d be radioactive.”

  “Okay. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But let me ask you this: is it actually illegal for you to consult for BHC Industries? Susan consults all over the goddamn world. She’s raking in speaking fees on every continent. Basically, what I’m proposing is a consulting arrangement. I’m a green entrepreneur. You are an expert in the field of sustainability. I see no problem here whatsoever.”

  “Well—”

  “Just think about it, Anne, that’s all,” he cut her off. “I think you’re just surprised how fast this is all moving. Which is understandable. I know everything in the public sector moves ver-r-r-y slowly. But let me tell you something, Anne.” He flagged the passing waitress, a gesture that came as easily as breathing. “Out here in the real world, when things happen, they happen fast. Now is the time to get on this train. You could end up in a very comfortable place at the end of this ride. It could be a pretty sweet back end we’re talking about. Oh yeah, back end, BHC . . .” And so it devolved from there.

  Anne said she’d think about his proposition, knowing she wouldn’t really think about it, and knowing that their lunch would soon recede into a dim chamber of her memory, joining so many half-forgotten lunches and barely remembered conversations in the murky pit. Maybe they would bump into each other at a conference somewhere or ping each other with the occasional email. But Mark Harris was destined for a kindly haze of acquaintanceship, one name among many names occasionally beaming into her in-box.

  Sitting at her desk, eating her bag lunch, she did the math on the proposed salary, though. Had he really said five thousand a month? That penciled out to sixty grand a year before taxes. With that, plus her normal salary, she could practically send Aaron to Harvard. At the very least she could allow him to exit his higher education unfettered by debt, as her own father had done for her. And if he did really say five thousand a month, that probably meant she would have to do some real work for him, get her hands dirty. But maybe not, too. Maybe to him five thousand a month was nothing. He lived in such an ocean of capital that money had become a complete abstraction. Feelings of revulsion, curiosity, greed, wonder, and indignation braided inside her, never coming to rest.

  She put it all out of her mind. She didn’t have time to think about Mark Harris or BHC Industries because she had other things on her docket, such as her meetings on the erosion abatement program in La Jolla, which was entering its second year of bureaucratic deliberation, with at least two or three years to go before anything resembling real-life action might happen. The meetings went fine. She liked the head of the committee. He had a kid Aaron’s age, and they traded teenage war stories. He was a kindly, patient, self-effacing guy, with a mature comprehension of the ins and outs of public-policy making. He understood that the whole point was the creation of social priorities, the pursuit of long-term endeavors that merited society’s collective time and resources.

  He was the opposite, in other words, of Mark Harris, who wouldn’t stop bothering her with his emails. Two or three times a day, his name appeared in the queue, probably sent from the cockpit of his private experimental plane or the massage table at his martial arts training compound.

  “Hurry up,” he said.

  “Figure it out.”

  “Let’s get this on!”

  She didn’t respond to most of the messages, and she was mildly surprised, even a little irritated, when they kept popping up. He just kept at it, not in a nagging or belligerent way, but always in a light, funny way, as if he genuinely liked her personality and wanted to share some of his delightful good fortune. He started attaching pictures of fat women to most of his emails. Fat women in bikinis. Fat women covered in grease paint. Fat hippies. Fat Muslims. Rubens paintings, Fertility goddesses. It could have been considered sexual harassment if a person wanted to look at it that way, but Anne didn’t. She knew Mark Harris was just a perverted little boy eager for attention, whether good or bad, and that she’d given him the license by not scolding him the first time. He was just staying visible, teasing her. In that, he had exactly the right intuition.

  Indeed, he had good intuition. He seemed to understand something about her that most people missed. From the outside, she might have appeared to be the holder of strict principles, a public servant dedicated to the ideals of deep ecology and social justice, a strident warrior of fairness, but Mark had sensed otherwise. He seemed to comprehend that she’d taken the path of public service not out of grand principles but rather because it had been the path of least resistance. It hadn’t been hard to find this kind of work out of college. She’d never been actively greedy or materialistic. But to call her an upright pillar of society wasn’t precisely correct, either. She was an opportunist, like everyone else, and she was often amazed by her coworkers and friends who honestly believed in their own unshakable moral fortitude. She listened to them make their grand pronouncements, decry other people’s weakness and avarice, knowing full well that their principles had never been put to the test.

  Here was Mark Harris, testing her. How did he know she might be susceptible?

  It was hard to say when exactly the switch clicked in her head. Sometime during the week Susan was off in Costa Rica, presenting her paper on the Pomona Green Corridor, claiming authorship for the seven-year battle Anne had orchestrated, eating swordfish on the taxpayer’s dime. Sometime during the week Mr. Dimond didn’t die and Aaron didn’t come home until three AM two nights in a row. The switch started clicking one of those nights as she was lying awake, waiting for her son to creep in the door. Most likely Mark Harris’s scheme, if you could even call it that, wouldn’t work, anyway, she thought. There were so many guys like Mark sloshing around these days, guys with elaborate spreadsheets and expensive business cards and killer apps promising to revolutionize the world’s energy-consumption patterns, none of whose plans ever seemed to pencil out in the end. They weren’t malicious, most of them, just wishful, deluded fools like Mark.

  Probably Mark Harris was no different from them. But even if he was different and he succeeded in buying the city’s wastewater and selling it back to his fellow citizens at an exorbitant profit someday, what did that really mean? Whom did it hurt? What was public and what was private anymore? Every decade, it was getting harder to tell.

  Lying in bed at two, three in the morning, hoping Aaron was not out shooting heroin somewhere, not impaled on a barrier on the side of some highway, hoping her dad was not lying broken on the kitchen floor, cool air tumbling over his body from the open refrigerator door, she felt the switch clicking. Maybe Mark Harris’s scheme—which would never work anyway, and which would not really mean anything even if it did—maybe this scheme was the thing that could drag her from the quicksand of her life. She’d been making her way long enough in the world to know this was exactly the kind of thing that might actually lead somewhere. This was the kind of utterly absurd, utterly unexpected side door that took you places. She knew by now that nothing ever happened just by your walking up and knocking on the front door.

  When she woke up, Aaron was home, snoring in his twisted sheets, his room reeking of hot beer farts and teenage BO. The next email from Mark that popped onto her phone got a response. She’d do a little nosing around, she wrote, talk to some people on behalf of BHC Industries. Why not? she thought. Truly, why the fuck not?

  8

  Ben moved through the airport without speaking to a soul, stepping from the deboarding tunnel into the concourse and gliding smoothly
through the banks of illuminated monitors, reading the signs. Signs were everywhere—embedded in walls, imprinted on temporary placards, hung on movable pillars—but his eyes tracked only the signs relevant to his mission—those pointing to gate 56.

  He entered a tunnel and walked alongside the rolling people mover, keeping pace with the docile herd, then climbed the stairs by twos beside the escalator, overtaking the docile herd. He waited on the platform for the terminal train, and the docile herd caught up, only to soften and seep into the walls of the capsules, filling the whispering cars with its docile flesh.

  He followed the ramps siphoning him to the last arcade of food vendors, and he took a moment to peruse the eating options, finding the bread at every food dispenser to be the same bread. They’d perfected some kind of simulated artisanal bread product with the appearance of a brown, hand-baked crust, but underneath the crust was obviously the same empty sponge of the old massproduced loaf. The magazines nearby were all the same, the same as the ones for sale in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Terre Haute, filled with the same pictures of the same arbitrarily renowned men and women and their poor, accursed children. He leafed through an issue of Fast Company, the monthly hagiography of capital, with a nearly wondrous emotion of disgust.

  He took a seat in the far corner of the gate and soothed himself by observing the slow traffic of the taxiing 737s and watching the silent lights and the weightless motion of the luggage trucks drifting on the pavement. His mind became calm, filled with the old, peaceful feeling of the mission. It had always been this way. With the acceptance of the mission came a luminous clarity to the world, a brightening of the colors and a sharpening of the sounds. As his eyes roamed the passing civilians, all the scene’s information seemed discrete and knowable at a glance. It had been a long period of muddled incoherency, an era of nagging uncertainty about what, if anything, was worth his attention, but once again he knew which story drove most deeply into the days ahead. Among all the people in the world, only he knew that in a matter of days, weeks at the most, Michael Holmes, CEO of Blackhawk Consulting Solutions, global leader in procurement, construction, and multinational project management, would likely be dead.