My mind wandered more productively in the dark, but guests usually objected to groping around by incoming starlight. Another reason to be glad I was alone. The dark was extra comforting tonight because nothing was luminous that shouldn’t have been. I crossed the silent living room with tentative steps, ready to stop when my toes met with obstacles. Ejected the Residents from my CD player and put in some Roxy Music. Returned, like an astronaut slowly traversing lunar surface, to couch and coffee table and refilled my glass. High time I realized that today’s dying pumpkin patch was a case of history repeating itself. With its parallel way back in the twentieth century, when the Heroux family’s corn and squash had been destroyed by windborne gray dust. I’d presumed the dust was part of hostile exotic environment that had wafted through the portal, or else the baneful traces of what had already fallen victim to alien influence. But suppose the portal was admitting sentient life that appeared to us as dust, and that spread invisibly as a solution in water?
Atwood would hear none of this either, though the poisoned pumpkins were nothing he could ignore, or fail to investigate, especially in conjunction with my data on infant mortality. And what, I wondered, would he hold responsible for “crawling skin syndrome,” since space invaders could hardly figure among the candidates? Who cared, so long as he got the ball rolling with a ban on city water?
I killed the bottle, listened to the CD, stared into darkness, and concluded, This has been a good Saturday, and an evening well-spent. To most onlookers it might have seemed dull and pathetic. How did I tolerate such a monkish life? As if a gym or a disco would have helped me shape tonight’s insights! Hah. See what they thought of my pathetic life after I saved their precious town.
Why wasn’t I at least on the lookout for a significant other? Truth is, I had been head-over-heels in love, during college, in Boston. The relationship burned hot for a year, then went into on-again, off-again tailspin for a second year, plus a messy, protracted breakup that ensured I’d never mistake that senior semester for the happiest months of my life. Afterward, I didn’t have it in me to pursue another soulmate and risk going through all that again. A classic instance of once burnt, twice shy. Wasn’t even sorry her name was buried in some synaptic pothole on most days. Like now. So why the hell was I dwelling on this water under the dam? Might as well blame the pale ale, since it wasn’t likely to backtalk in self-defense.
9
Sunday I soldiered through a low-level headache to print out images of diseased pumpkins and type up the stats I’d pilfered from Mr. Marsh’s files. What a pity I could no longer bounce back with impunity from a night of drinking alone. On the positive side, navigating in a moderate fog all day kept me from overthinking what I’d say and wear on Monday morning. To quote Oscar Wilde, real life was too important to take seriously, and the upshot might be woefully serious if I continued acting the gadfly without any friends in City Hall. Maybe that was why I racked up four hours’ sleep at best.
When the enchanting secretary showed me in at precisely 10:30, I was only mildly self-conscious in a powder-gray suit I usually unbagged for funerals. While crossing the room, had to admire a gigantic poster in a nouveau gilt frame, on the wall opposite Atwood’s desk, for Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune, probably the coolest thing he could get away with putting up in here, and which blended right in with the Victorian décor. Atwood proffered a warm handshake and a brown leather armchair in front of his rosewood desk. “You had some information about environmental concerns? In regard to this building or the city in general? You’re on Mr. Marsh’s staff, aren’t you?”
I sat down, set my flea-market briefcase on my lap, and opened it, lest I get tongue-tied at this rare collegial treatment in the workplace.
I was never prouder of myself, never more articulate or composed or dynamic, as I summarized hospital records in support of anecdotal evidence, a.k.a. the tragedy of Wil and Lucinda, minus its least naturalistic elements. Luminous amniotic fluid, yes, that made the cut. Morgan crawling postmortem, no. A fine line to negotiate! And to maternal calamities I cannily tied irrigated harvests wilting on the vine and laid out my high-res illustrations. Ended with an earnest appeal for him to order more rigorous analyses of city water, targeting radioactivity, exotic trace elements, and less common pollutants, and banning its use in homes and on crops, pending test results. Lives were at stake, and dealing decisively with an emergent public health issue could only cast him in a heroic light. I skirted the pitfall of listing corpse-lights and yesteryear’s poison dust, with its supernatural overtones, among the more fantastic attributes of reservoir pollution. Remarkable how brightly I could shine when officials treated me as an equal, or when they resembled me enough to let me feel I was talking to myself. A flawless presentation, if I did say so.
Then why was moisture beginning to spread under my armpits? The first familiar trickles of flop sweat? Atwood’s casual riffle through my photos, giving each the minimal polite once-over, didn’t augur well. Nor did the searching look on his downcast face, as if he wished the desktop concealed an escape hatch. Still averting his eyes from mine, he extracted a folded newspaper from a well-oiled top drawer. He passed it over to me. It was the Town and Country section of Sunday’s Occam Advertiser. “I appreciate your initiative coming in here, but I’m sorry you didn’t come across this yesterday.”
The headline above a quarter-page article proclaimed, “Bees, Borers Behind Bad Year on Farms.” Alarming full-color close-ups of a honeybee and a bulbous white caterpillar enlivened the text.
“No, I didn’t see this,” I confessed.
“I don’t mean for you to read it now, but it covers more extensive fieldwork than a single pumpkin patch. The writers build a pretty convincing case for a multifaceted impact on different crops all over the county. A perfect storm, if you like.”
I didn’t like. His recourse to one of those clichés beloved of newscasters set my teeth on edge, but I exerted myself to nod affably and rein in my grimace.
“A spike in the population of squash vine borers coincided with a spike in other insect pests,” he went on. “And as you may have heard, hive collapse has been a problem this summer. In short, why go on a costly wild-goose chase after something bizarre and indefinite, when we don’t need more explanations for crop failures than we already have?”
I knew full well why we needed to chase something bizarre, but was briefly dumbstruck at a co-author’s name in the article’s byline. Ephraim Atwood? Brother or cousin of Nathan? My inner gears froze till I gave up on phrasing a way to ask about family connections that wouldn’t infer the Atwoods were in cahoots.
“As it stands, I’m persuaded these tribulations are temporary,” Nathan Atwood declared in answer to his own rhetorical question. “Inside the credible boundaries of natural extremes. I’ll even go out on a limb and say the bees will come back by themselves. Or people will reintroduce them, as they’ve done elsewhere. The situation is unfortunate but under control, unless you can show otherwise.”
To his credit, Atwood was disputing me in a civil tone. Neither dismissive nor high-handed. Taking the time to spell out his opinion for me, when he could have cut this meeting short and pawned me off on the Department of Health or Environmental Management. I still respected him, but wasn’t about to throw in the towel on his say-so.
“This involves more than agriculture,” I reminded him. “There’s also the abnormally high infant mortality rate. Don’t you find that at all suspicious, happening at the same time as vegetation dying?”
“And many births still proceed normally. Just as some plantings have come along normally. How would you account for those, if everyone’s using the same unsafe water?”
In terms of something alien that could encroach in only so many places at once? No, that wouldn’t do. “Mr. Atwood, that’s not a criterion you could apply in the context of any other disease. Some people, and some plants, are always more susceptible, and some are more resistant. Good genes, good nourishment, more fit in
general.”
The spring in Atwood’s chair squeaked as he leaned back and considered me as if we were old cronies with a cracker barrel between us. “Okay, I grant you that.” He indicated my notes and photos on his desk with an easygoing gesture. “Before we tie up city resources in search of God knows what, though, you’d have to make me believe there’s more in all this than a sheaf of random factoids.”
“Maybe I can do that for you right now.” And maybe my outbreak of flop sweat had been premature. “Some details in my presentation may not have received the proper emphasis. What we’re dealing with is a congenital condition that the mother then acquires from the baby. Isn’t that an odd enough twist in the normal course of events for you to drop everything and take a closer look?”
Atwood raised his line of sight toward the Méliès poster behind me. “I do feel sorry for the family. My heart goes out to them. As you just said, though, this condition has affected only one mother that you know of. A little too soon to call it part of anything bigger. I don’t even see where the illness would necessarily have spread from the child to the mother. She could have had a pre-existing condition that stayed latent until the stress of childbirth or a pathogen in the hospital or other triggers activated it, in which case, the mother would have infected the child with this mysterious condition prenatally, so it showed up in the child first, with his weaker immune system, and then the mother, as her condition deteriorated. Lead poisoning is known to follow such a pattern. Framing it that way, we don’t have to posit some wild convolution of cause and effect.”
This verbal sparring was costing me a lot of energy. Worse, Atwood’s serene, relentless voice of reason was wearing away the underpinnings of what I knew damn well to be true, like gentle waves eroding granite piers. Time to sink or swim. “But your argument would fall apart, wouldn’t it, if the father was also showing signs of the baby’s malady?”
“Well, that would tilt the balance a little in your direction.” His gaze shifted from Méliès to me. I’d finally delivered a salvo he hadn’t seen coming. “Provided you bring me strong supporting material. Medical records, or a video diary comparing father and son.” His sporting smile awarded me a point. “And we’ll work from there.”
Leather heels on hardwood floor grew audible beyond Atwood’s closed door. They stopped and I held my breath, thinking nothing at that juncture except, This is my fifteen minutes in here. Go away!
Silence ensued for what may have been a mere heartbeat or two, though it seemed much longer. I was all ears and lost track of whatever was in front of me. Then the footsteps receded, which all too briefly seemed the optimal turn of events.
Atwood smiled mildly on as if nothing had impinged on his awareness, but the atmosphere chilled immediately. “In fairness to us both, don’t misread me. I’m not trying to encourage you. This pure-hearted quest of yours might do a lot more harm than good.”
His chair squeaked as he sat up straight again, ambled to the nearest in a row of bay windows, opened it wide, and beckoned me over. Did all the third-floor honchos rate sanctums with windows that went up and down? A draft of the nippy air that had lingered since Saturday made me shiver. “From here, it’s normal as far as the eye can see.” He was right, but the odds were stacked in his favor. Decaying Commercial Street was around the corner. City Hall fronted a glazed brick square, which it shared with the 1970s structures housing the Advertiser, the courthouse, the Occam Savings and Loan, and the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Victorian idea had been to buffer the town fathers from the loud nuisance of mercantile activity by placing City Hall’s façade on what was then a side street, whereas now the building’s placement buffered their modern counterparts from the main drag’s desolation. Lawyers, bureaucrats, other “professional” types, and citizens across the demographic spectrum fostered a fine illusion of vitality, with the added vexation of contented moms expectant or with babes in arms, as if expressly out to refute me. “That normality isn’t something to disrupt lightly. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?” My lips remained politely sealed, and he set his gaze upon the scene below. “I bet you’re sick of hearing this, but the city, county, and state each run their own tests every month, and the water has always come back clean.”
So soon after spouting the cliché “perfect storm,” for him to parrot the official excuse for quashing debate about the reservoir was doubly disappointing. Annoyance rallied my flagging strength. “Then please, arrange for more exhaustive tests while we still have that semblance of normality, before it’s too late. The standard battery can’t be perfect.”
Atwood was beginning to wear his patience on his sleeve, as if rubbing it in that our interview was proceeding solely at his finite sufferance. “You also must be aware that we’re operating under a deficit. Cutbacks and layoffs are forcing us to plug holes in the infrastructure with band-aids and gum. Those of us still on the payroll are lucky.” That couldn’t be a muffled threat, could it? “The crux of it is, we can barely afford to keep doing what we’re doing now, and what we’re doing is the absolute essentials. More stringent water tests would put us deeper in the hole. There’s no money to spare unless you build a case too powerful to ignore, that would justify our risk of adverse PR from coast to coast, and of a very angry, very frightened public here. As for everything you’ve shown me today, insofar as there’s a kernel of credibility in any of it, it all might easily consist of disconnected blips that’ll pass on their own. As all things must, sooner or later.” With the informality fading from his smile, he shut the window, a clear symbolic signal that our meeting had also drawn to a close. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be partly responsible for plunging your hometown into receivership.” He extended his hand with a Prussian degree of warmth.
I took it with the spirit into which he had descended, and would have felt more crestfallen had I not completely run out of steam. As on those few other occasions when I’d been firing on all six cylinders, I crashed and crumbled all too soon. Wanted to hide somewhere and grab a nap, but before unhanding Atwood, fought to salvage one scrap to good purpose. “Until such time as I have more to divulge, could I please have your word that our discussion will be kept in confidence?”
“Sure.” He nodded absently. Mind already on his next order of business, no doubt. With a dwindling pretense of enthusiasm, I let go of his hand and thanked him for sparing the time to listen and address my concerns. That’s what he was there for, he quipped with a straight face, and ushered me out.
The bewitching secretary had her nose in an appointment book and didn’t see me tromp through. After fifteen minutes on the sunny elite mountaintop, I was down in the bog again. Resorted to black coffee from a machine in the basement to revive myself. By its bitter end, two rationales for City Hall’s intransigence were vying inconclusively, with only a cover-up in common. On the one hand, the government of Occam, like any other organism, whether individual, collective, or corporate, was foremost dedicated to self-preservation, above and beyond creed or charter or professed ideals. Naturally, Atwood and Westcott and everyone else on the third floor would, as Atwood frankly admitted, protect their governmental house of cards from inconvenient facts that might unsteady it. Closing ranks for the sake of the body politic, and their own careers. Suppressing the truth, and deliberately blinding themselves to it, even to the point of criminal dissociation. And could I honestly say I’d have acted so differently from Atwood, had our roles been reversed?
On the other hand, if alien sentience had infiltrated politicians’ bloodstreams and corrupted their minds, Westcott’s gratuitous hostility became easier to explain. Moreover, I could forget about the cooperation of any infected officials, whatever my quality of forthcoming evidence, whereas their violent opposition was a cut-and-dried given. I thought again of those footsteps that had preceded the change in Atwood’s tone, without a word aloud to influence him, and I glumly inserted quarters in the machine for another fortifying cup of coffee, despite its assertive taint of th
e Gorman taste.
I stifled an urge to merge with the shadows when a pair of high heels click-clacked into earshot down the cement-floored corridor. Maybe someone searching for the janitor. Maybe Ms. Lathrop keeping tabs on me. In any case, false alarm. Nobody entered visual range, but to my chagrin I couldn’t stop wondering, Was it one of us, or one of them?
10
I wrangled a personal day for later that week and wasted a good half of it. In my kitchen, on the sea-foam green and silver gray Formica table, my whitish cudgel of an old portable phone lay next to a double shot of McClelland’s. Lunch plate and saucepan were soaking in the sink. I was sipping at my Scotch courage every several minutes. Atwood, presumably a man of honor, had agreed, in so many words, to review my data with a less jaundiced eye if I recorded signs of “crawling skin syndrome” in Wil. Not the most enticing proposition. Wil was infamous for holding a grudge. The Occam General maternity ward and I might well languish persona non grata till doomsday. He’d never buzz me through the front door of Dyer Hall, and supposing he did, I didn’t want to risk seeing what remained of Morgan. However, Wil might have to mount a veneer of civility if my camcorder and I cornered him at work. Assuming he could still hold down a job. I snatched up the phone and called the Department of Parks. Drummed my fingertips on the tabletop till the automated menu gave an extension for the “Gorman County Reservoir Control Center.” Long shot or not, this was my one excuse to importune Atwood again. My one possibility of a friend in high places.
I was poised to jab the Off button should Wil answer, but no, it was a chipper Ranger Metcalfe. “Don’t tear him away from whatever he’s doing,” I prefaced, “but could you tell me if Wil Rice is in today?” I couldn’t tear him away if I wanted to, Ranger Metcalfe remarked, because Wil was a mile away on path maintenance. Any message? No, but could the ranger tell me if Wil was on one of the public hiking trails? Yes, he ought to be. Metcalfe came across as an enviably upbeat fellow, which I attributed in large part to his career choice. Too bad I hadn’t grown up to be a forest ranger! Before heading out, I finished my drink with the biggest mouthfuls my cut-rate sophistication would countenance. No guzzling single malt faster than I could taste it, even the stuff within my budget. My one non-negotiable concession to class.
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