Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “I know I shouldn’t,” she agreed. “Wasn’t that the whole point?”

  “What I mean is, you should be back at the motel. Why did we go to the trouble of getting you that room if you’re going to camp out at my place?” He resolved to leave the bed, sat up, and picked up his underwear from the floor with his toes. “I’ve got work to do.”

  In a belated demonstration of modesty, she wrapped the sheet around her breasts. “I don’t see why you need to crash that stupid meeting,” she said. “I know you don’t really believe that stuff.”

  “I believe it.” He stood up and located his jeans. He was usually a neat person, but since she’d arrived at his bungalow, his clothes were constantly in balls on the floor. What point was there in folding laundry and stowing it in his dresser if he was just going to act like a pig whenever he had company? He was thirty-four, damn it. Adam was the kind of man who kept reminding himself how old he was.

  “Bullshit,” she said. She snaked across the mattress, reached over to the stack of lime green paper in the corner—losing for a moment her makeshift top—and took a pamphlet. She unfolded it and began to read the text, which Adam had meticulously crafted with the help of Wikipedia: “A mutant animal washes up in Orient, discovered by local hunters, and is immediately confiscated by government agents who have yet to produce any explanation or reassurance for a concerned public. A public who shares the water with a level-three biological-warfare and animal-disease laboratory that has been conducting clanstine—I think you meant clandestine—genetic experiments since 1954 without—”

  “—once opening the site to private inspectors to determine its health risks on area wildlife and population.” He stopped quoting. “I know what it says, I wrote it.”

  “This poor woman,” she said, tapping the section about the terrorist doctor who had her terrorist sights on Plum. “What kind of woman keeps mass-annihilation plans in her purse on the way to the airport?”

  Adam dressed in a hurried manner, hoping to indicate that he had somewhere important to be. He found his wristwatch next to a box of tampons, which should be in her motel room and not at his house.

  “Anyway, didn’t they already announce that Plum Island is closing down in a couple of years?”

  “So?” he said. “Don’t you think it’s better to find out the truth before the government packs up and decides it’s no longer their problem? Out of sight, out of responsibility. Too bad, folks. Lyme disease? It’s all in your head. And Lyme might be the least of it. There could be far worse viruses out there.”

  “Adam,” she said meaningfully. He threw her bra on the bed. “You really need to focus on building your own business, not trying to drum up paranoia.”

  He took a second to appreciate how seamlessly women’s breasts were stowed in cells of elastic and lace.

  “Security is my business,” he stammered. “At least it will be. And when I come to be seen as the man who was brave enough to ask the hard questions and get answers, people on the North Fork will start coming to me for their security needs.”

  She smiled, unconvinced, and returned the pamphlet to the stack.

  “I don’t understand why that’s so hard for you to understand,” he whined. “I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.”

  Until recently, Adam had been having trouble raising the seed money to start Pruitt Securities, even after selling off his father’s six Sound-front acres to a neighbor. He thought about his father for a moment, the bulk and sweaty weight of him, a man who had died of mesothelioma after forty years of working as a construction worker laying asbestos-lined pipe for the township, until those toxic materials finally delivered the cancer to his lungs. In his last days, his father took in air like a man drowning, straining every muscle for one precious lungful. Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

  “I’m so tired of hearing about security,” she moaned.

  “Security,” he said tauntingly as he placed a Marlboro between his lips and lit the tip.

  “I don’t see how you’re paying for this.” She stood up and kicked the box of posters he’d made at the Kinko’s in Riverhead. “If you can afford all this, why can’t you take me out to dinner?”

  “You can’t go out to dinner.” He let smoke drift from his tongue, a beating wick. “You aren’t supposed to be in Orient, remember?”

  She dressed lazily, pulling on her jeans and stretching a sweatshirt over her head, the belated question WHY DON’T WE SAIL FIRST? emblazoned across it. He was relieved that she wouldn’t be there when he and his friends barged into Poquatuck Hall. They’d wave the posters printed with his photos of the mutant creature; it looked to him like a toxic monster villain in a comic book, like Geryon in his dead mother’s illustrated copy of Dante. Except it was Orient’s very own genetic nightmare come to life.

  She watched him smoke as if she were smoking, lips puckered, pupils widening at intake. She clucked her tongue.

  “It wasn’t even real, was it? That creature on the shore.”

  She was starting to annoy him. She’d been annoying him for the past two weeks. There was an expiration date on all relationships, and he suspected they were nearing theirs. Adam had never been good at ending things. He ended them by thinking of them as ended and moving on.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he told her. His lips were still covered in her juice. It sopped the filter of his cigarette.

  “Fine. I just don’t want to go back to Seaview. It’s fucking boring.”

  “It was your decision.”

  “How was I to know?” she said. “I’m not from around here anymore.”

  “Sure you’re not.”

  She gave him the finger, then used the finger to draw a heart in the fog on the bathroom mirror.

  Bryan Muldoon brought his posters to Poquatuck alone. Theo had complained at dinner that his cheeks felt warm, “like microwave cheeks,” and Pam decided to skip the crucial town meeting to keep their youngest in bed with an armada of cold water bottles.

  Ted was uncharacteristically prompt, waiting for Bryan at precisely 6:30 by the glass announcement board outside Poquatuck Hall, and together they entered the gray-shingled building on the corner of Village Lane. Poquatuck was built in 1874 by the same architect who had constructed the bridge between Orient and East Marion. Both structures were designed to foster connection—one by geography, the other through community—and all roads in Orient eventually led to one or the other. Bryan and Ted assembled a row of folding chairs across the stage, set Bryan’s four posters on stands, and propped an out-of-focus photograph of their departed fellow board member Magdalena Kiefer against the stage, her frail, expressionless face blown up and glued sloppily onto a sheet of cardboard. Ted set two pots of poinsettias at the corners to hold it in place.

  “It could look a little more professional,” Bryan said, comparing Ted’s work to his own: four sleek posters—pie charts and graphs—printed on expensive backing.

  Ted offered an apologetic smile. “It’s the sentiment. And we can’t scrap it. Her name’s on the initiative.” He stepped back. “From a distance, you don’t even notice the glue.”

  Bryan turned to lock eyes with Ted. “I’m worried about those Plum Island agitators. Those signs out by the tip: ‘Demand answers.’ Don’t they understand we’re fighting for the same thing? To preserve the land, to keep it safe.” Ted nodded, familiar with Bryan’s stump speech.

  “This is something I can never tell my students, but do you know what geography really is?” Ted asked. “It’s not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It’s a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation.” Ted spread his hands, suddenly transported in a way that rarely
came over him in his high school classroom with its nicotine-colored pull-down maps. “There’s always going to be a fight for land. And it’s never going to stay put without some muscle to defend it.” Ted gestured toward the room of empty tables and chairs. “You sell the initiative tonight and we’ll save it. Remember how well we did with the water-main debacle.”

  Bryan did take solace in that. Two years ago, seemingly out of nowhere, the county had submitted a proposal to extend a three-mile water main from East Marion to Orient, bringing the first public water service to a village whose residents had been relying on their own private wells since its settlement. But the proposal met with so much hostility that locals took to calling it “the water-main debacle” or “the main debacle” or, eventually, just “the debacle.” It was the closest Orient ever got to declaring civil war on the rest of Long Island.

  It wasn’t just that the project would have created a construction nightmare on the two-lane causeway. The key chairs of the Orient Historical Board foresaw far more dangerous stakes in the Suffolk County Water Authority’s overzealous proposal. What was at stake was the power to keep Orient out of the easy reaches of developers. As long as underground wells were the town’s only source of water, no high-rise condominium complexes could blight the coastline. No cavernous Walmarts or shoe box Radissons or grease-windowed restaurant chains could clear precious farmland and set up shop. Without public water, even ten toilets flushing successively would paralyze the plumbing. When SCWA, buoyed by federal stimulus money, announced its intentions, they touted the benefits of cleaner water and the freedom from having to maintain antiquated tanks. But what the historical board saw was the ghost of Orient’s future: the concrete, suburban sprawl that had already enveloped the rest of Long Island, one industrial pressure-flush toilet at a time. The entire fate of Orient rested on a matter of pipes.

  Bryan Muldoon and his eight fellow board members were not elected or county-approved. Their membership was self-selected, based on family status and a commitment to community affairs. The Orient Historical Board, or OHB, had been formed casually four decades ago to aid in the preservation of several Federal-style settlement buildings—the old nineteenth-century boardinghouse, the older eighteenth-century schoolhouse—that stood opposite Poquatuck Hall on Village Lane. But as time went on the board expanded its mission, beyond preserving the past, to preserving the present. The Orient Historical Board held no official power in Suffolk County, but unofficially it held the power of influence and outrage. In the last decade alone, the board had pressured the county into passing zoning laws on Orient real estate (ten-acre, five-acre, and two-acre plots could not be easily subdivided; commercial development was strictly forbidden). In return, OHB lent its support to the county superintendent during election years. The cycle of reciprocal altruism had harmoniously persisted until two years ago, when SCWA went AWOL on OHB.

  Bryan led the effort against the water main. He organized petitions, went door to door to collect signatures, artistically Photoshopped images of midwestern supermalls onto Orient farms, called for the impeachment of the superintendent, and brought supporters to flood the monthly council meeting in Southold with fevered complaints—the unifying message being, “when water comes, development follows.” When the water company’s CEO insisted that the main would supply only twenty-four homes on Browns Hill with water, the answer was, No sir, that’s just the beginning. When environmental agents revealed that a test of private wells in Orient turned up troubling amounts of gasoline by-product, Bryan and his allies made a public show of guzzling the tap water with unbelievable thirst. When certain previously faithful residents admitted that they might actually like their toilet waste to disappear in a single flush or their sprinkler systems to sprinkle continuously, the reprisals were subtle but swift: longstanding neighborhood cookouts were canceled, birthdays no longer acknowledged, even a few car tires deflated overnight. Finally, after months of negotiations, the proposal was shelved, “until we fix a few internal problems with the water map.” But the CEO insisted to Bryan, during their final, tense encounter, that their retreat was only temporary. “You can’t fight progress forever. Modernization has a way of happening.”

  After the debacle, OHB no longer felt safe leaving Orient’s future up to Suffolk County. Tonight, at seven o’clock, Bryan Muldoon would go on the offensive. As he ran through his talking points, he noticed a journalist from the Suffolk Times lingering near the front door with a young, safari-capped photographer. The first year-rounders were drifting into the hall, grabbing a flyer and helping themselves to the brownies Karen Norgen had baked.

  The photograph of Magdalena brought a needed solemnity to the proceedings. The initiative they were here to debate—a nondevelopment trust—had been Magdalena’s brainchild, an embryo that Bryan instantly surrogate-fathered, calling in favors from environmental liaisons and spending his nights studying how similar conservation easements had preserved Montana’s cattle fields and wild trout fisheries. Magdalena’s untimely death was the first obstacle they’d encountered. Bryan could preach the statistics supporting voluntary conservation, but it was Lena’s elderly graciousness, and her long relationship with the local farmers, that Bryan had been counting on to drive the message from brain to heart.

  Sarakit Herrig climbed the steps to the stage. She offered a curt hello before rearranging the stands for a more dramatic display. George Morgensen appeared, dressed in his retirement uniform of mismatched golf pastels. The other four members of the board were the elderly offspring of ancestral families—Max Griffin, Helen Floyd, Kelley Flanner, Archie Young—whose combined ownership of Orient counted in the hundreds of acres. Each had the chapped faces and invisible chins of early North Fork pioneers (now on view in sepia photographs in the museum’s “Pioneers of Peace” gallery). Arthur Cleaver had driven out from the city to fulfill his role as the board’s legal counsel. Bryan knew that Arthur, a distinguished attorney with iron hair who seemed to perspire duty-free cologne, had no passion for the trust, but his volunteer work kept him abreast of local controversies. Bryan took Arthur as the kind of man who enjoyed the thrill of watching disasters from a distance.

  The members took their seats as attendees flooded the hall; the meeting’s autumn date conveniently tipped the scales away from the summer weekenders. Bryan noticed his hunting buddy Alistair Swallow, Mitch Tabach with his aluminum legs and brand-new hip, Paul Benchley with his morose foster-care ward, the Stillpasses, Ina Jenkins, Reverend Ann Whitlen, and even Roe diCorcia, a corn farmer and obdurate enemy of OHB, who had supported the water-main proposal because it would have aided in the irrigation of his crops. Everyone spoke in whispers of Magdalena, and Bryan heard Karen Norgen use the word murder twice, the second time within the same breath as “Beth Shepherd.” Beth’s mother, Gail, slipped in a little after seven—a surprise, since most assumed she had been driven back over the causeway to Southold for good.

  “Let’s get started,” Bryan said, standing on the stage with the microphone to his lips. “First I’d like to take a moment of silence for our recently departed board member, Magdalena Kiefer. Magdalena, who passed away this weekend, would have appreciated the strong turnout tonight, bringing us together for this important cause.”

  What was the acceptable increment of time for a moment of silence? Two seconds? Five? Eight? Bryan realized he’d forgotten to mention that Magdalena’s funeral was tomorrow. Should he do it now? No, he must stick to his script.

  “Magdalena was adamant about the initiative that I am going to spell out for you this evening, and we can only hope to honor her years of hard preservation work by naming it after her. She will be buried tomorrow.” He had stumbled into the ad lib to his own irritation. “At her funeral. Tomorrow. And naturally in our next meeting we will be electing a new board member to replace her.” He winced. “Not that we can replace her. But the funeral, it’s tomorrow. Now back to the reason we’re here.”

  The bright overhead lights created a metallic shine
on the white faces staring up at him. Friendly faces, but ugly here inside Poquatuck, with its acrylic cream walls. How ugly humans could be when jammed together in one room, all the color of cereal sitting too long in milk. Bryan felt a bead of sweat on his brow. He wished someone would open a window to bring some cold air into the hall.

  “Do they know what Magdalena died of?” a voice called out from the circular tables, a man’s voice, but Bryan couldn’t locate the questioner. Whispers spread on the floor. Bryan heard the phrase “Plum monster.”

  “I believe she had a heart attack,” Bryan replied. The photographer snapped a picture. The reporter wrote on her pad. “I saw Magdalena a few days before she died,” he said, awkwardly, as if he were admitting a secret, “and she was adamant about this initiative.” He was stumbling again, and he looked to history to bolster his confidence. “All of you remember how successfully we halted the water main two years ago. We have each other to thank for that victory.” Roe diCorcia raised his hand, but Bryan ignored it. He had finally found his rhythm. “But the work’s not over, folks. Not by a long shot. That was a wake-up call to OHB that we need to take the preservation of Orient into our own hands.”

  Bryan walked over to the first poster. “Today, I want to share our plan for conservancy. We have fended off encroachment with zoning regulations, but we all know the powers that be in Southold are not to be trusted in enforcing those conditions.” The poster bore the headline THE KIEFER NONDEVELOPMENT ADVOCACY INITIATIVE, over a shot of phragmites and the sun-dappled waves of the Sound. He tapped the cardboard. “Today OHB takes one step further. We have filed for nonprofit status as a conservancy trust. This will give us the community power to control what gets built in our own backyards. But we need your help and agreement. Friends, the decision is with you. The Kiefer Nondevelopment Advocacy Initiative promises to protect nature and wildlife in Orient—and it comes with a financial benefit to all.