A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “And Plastic People?” Daniel said, changing the subject.

  “Vanished. Gone. No trace.”

  “That’s the point,” Daniel explained. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s going after Edward Bear because Plastic People has vanished.”

  “Can the EPA sue Edward Bear just because they can’t find Plastic People? They can’t do that, can they?”

  “Well, if the harm is indivisible – that is, if you and Plastic People both contributed to the improper disposal of the same waste, then either one of you can be held responsible for every last penny that’s spent to clean it up. Believe me,” Daniel said, disingenuously, “I really agree with you. It’s just unfair.”

  “Can the E.P.A. hold us responsible for something we didn’t even do?”

  “Well, maybe. Section 107 of the cleanup act puts liability on anyone who arranged for disposal of hazardous waste by contract. It’s vague as hell, Percy, but you get the idea: the point of the law is to go after anyone and everyone to get this shit cleaned up. On the other hand, there are some Third Circuit cases with language that cuts in our favor. But nothing’s dead-on. If we fight the EPA on this one, we’ll be making new law.”

  The phone line became very quiet.

  Finally:

  “And what do you recommend, Daniel?”

  Daniel’s reasoning was simple, but he couldn’t be completely truthful with Percy. If Edward Bear settled, the case would end ambiguously and other polluters wouldn’t exactly flock to Johnson & Tierney for representation. If they fought it and lost, it would be the same as settling. If they fought it and won ... the possibilities were endless. Overnight, Johnson & Tierney would have a growing environmental practice, thanks to Daniel, the up-and-coming future junior partner.

  “If you think you don’t deserve to pay, Percy, I’d say fight the thing,” he insisted. “That’s me, though. I wouldn’t take it sitting down. I just think it’s an injustice. That’s what it is. You know, if Rosa Parks had just sat at the back of the bus, maybe her day would have been more convenient … she would have gotten home in time to cook dinner, and so on. But then she’d be backing down in the face of injustice …”

  Edwards, haltingly, cut in.

  “I don’t think that’s really a good analogy. I don’t think this is really the same thing.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “Of course not, I was just talking off the top of my –”

  “I mean, why should a lady care whether she sits at the back of the bus or the front of the bus? That lady … well, with all due respect to her, she wanted a handout. She wanted someone to serve up the best seat on the bus, no matter who was there first. I’m just opposed to quota America, Daniel. You know, she still gets to ride on the bus. No one was saying to her, ‘Don’t ride on the bus.’ Work hard, play by the rules, don’t get uppity and make all kinds of waves, you get to ride on the bus.”

  For a moment, Daniel thought Percy was having fun with him. Fucking with him, as they say …. Then he realized that this was how Percy really felt. It was what Percy believed. It was his moral view of the universe. Daniel was obliged to agree. This was his own fault, after all.

  “Of course,” Daniel said. “I didn’t mean to suggest …. I mean, I’m afraid I’ve sidetracked you a bit …”

  “What the EPA is doing to me … I mean, this isn’t whatever-the-hell a good seat on the bus. This is tyranny, Daniel. This is right and wrong. Not getting a good seat on the bus, or front row at the opera, or the best reservations at, whatever it is, the best restaurant over there in Manhattan.”

  “Yes. Tyranny. Stalinism. It’s really just – ”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong,” Edwards said solidly, emboldened by Daniel’s encouragement. “Someone shouldn’t settle if he’s done nothing wrong. Don’t you think? I mean, I’ll sit in the front of the bus, the middle of the bus, the back of the bus … but this is a tyrannical government trying to throw hard-working businessmen off the bus. Right off the bus. Off the bus and into the mud. Well, I won’t stand for it. I won’t allow it. It’s unacceptable.”

  “All right,” Daniel said. “Send me everything you’ve got on Plastic People.” He smiled, a secret smile of satisfaction. His voice remained utterly serious. “We’ll kick into high gear tomorrow.”

  When he placed the phone back on the hook, Daniel wondered what Susan, who had so greatly and erroneously admired his environmental idealism, would have thought of this quietly earthshaking strategy session with his client, the industrial polluter. He imagined Susan walking through her New York life: brunch with the family on Sunday morning, sharing a late-night drink with Rachel across Broadway at Augie’s at which they would compare their notes on Daniel, perhaps laughing at his blunders, perhaps admiring his many false charms. All the time, harboring a fantasy of who Daniel really was.

  The very next day, before his afternoon litigation meeting at which he would report to the partners on progress in the Edward Bear matter, Daniel phoned Susan and left on her answering machine a message that he had spent ten minutes composing on a yellow legal pad. After he hung up the phone he felt assured that he had made no stupid mistakes, but worried that he might have sounded too stiff, that perhaps he would sound as though he were reading from a prepared text scribbled on a yellow legal pad. And so, when he took the elevator downstairs to the polished Johnson & Tierney conference room, and when he sat at his designated spot at the conference table, while presumably studying his notes, his thoughts persistently drifted back to Susan, and to whether she would like the telephone message to which he had devoted ten minutes of otherwise billable time.

  His distraction lingered through the endless weekend, as he sat at his desk reading legal opinions from every circuit in the country, searching for magic language, even just one sentence, or just four words, perhaps, to help him preserve intact the business and livelihood of the toxic polluter to which he had linked his future.

  On Saturday, and then again on Sunday, at six or seven in the evening, he ordered Chinese food delivered, then sat at his desk eating egg rolls and reading about pollution, as outside his window a lonely darkness descended on the East River. Every few minutes, he would glance at his silent telephone, and he would think of Susan.

  “You called me back,” Daniel said with surprise, when he heard Susan’s voice on the telephone the following Monday afternoon. “I thought you might not.” He swiveled about, turning his back to the door and speaking just quietly enough.

  “And how would you have reacted to that?” she asked him. “Would you have given up? Or would you have phoned me again and again, hanging up on my machine until you reached me in person. You know, Oh hello Susan, I think your answering machine must be broken, and all that?”

  Daniel hesitated.

  “I’m waiting, Daniel. It’s an important question.”

  “It’s a test.”

  “Yes. It is a test.”

  “I would have called and called,” Daniel said quickly. “How could I have given up?” He paused. “Was that the right answer?”

  “There’s no right or wrong answer,” she said. “Any answer to that question has its ups and downs, you know. Your grade depends on my mood at the moment. I suppose that right now I prefer neediness to pride.”

  “Oh. Lucky for me, I guess.”

  “Listen, I’ve noticed that I opened another bottle of wine just moments before you fell asleep.” He could hear her smiling. “Here’s the more important question, Daniel: will you come over and help me drink this bottle of wine? It’s red, and it won’t keep, and it’s your fault I opened it.”

  “I’d love to,” Daniel said. “Friday night? Saturday? I’m not too proud to let you name the time.”

  “Right now.”

  Daniel looked at his watch. He waited for her to laugh.

  “It’s the middle of the day,” he stammered at last.

  “I told you. Red wine doesn’t keep. Unless you put it in fridge, but then it’s cold. Red wine is a probl
em. A real conundrum, red wine.”

  “You know. Middle of the day ….”

  “Yes? And what are you doing, Daniel? Tinkering with a brief?”

  “I – ”

  “Are you beefing up the section on judicial estoppel?”

  “Well -”

  “I thought you would try to win me over, at least in the beginning. I thought you could be a little creative, maybe. Haven’t your bosses at Nazi, Inc. ever heard of a family emergency?” Then she added, with dark insistence: “Do you ever want to see me again?”

  Daniel held the phone receiver in a tight grip. If worse ever came to worst, he told himself hopefully, there were probably many other law firms eager to hire away a mid-level from J&T, even one rumored to have a blotch on his record. “Don’t move an inch,” he whispered with a conspicuously dry throat, then he hung up the phone and bolted for the door without waiting for a reply. “Family emergency Dolores!” he called to his secretary as he passed her in the hallway, leaped into the elevator, ran out the front door of the J&T building, hailed a cab, already out of breath, looked at his watch as the cab sped up the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Highway, then west through the park, past the newlyweds in their horse-drawn-carriages; he stuffed a twenty into the cabby’s outstretched hand in front of Susan’s building, ran into the lobby, up the stairs, then pounded on her door; she met him in her front hallway dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, and he drew her into his arms. Susan slammed the door shut behind her and kissed him, long and hard, pushing him up against the wall “Is this stupid?” she whispered in his ear. “Am I being stupid?”

  “I love you,” he said under his breath. “I realized it in the cab. I apologize for telling you that.”

  She said nothing in return, but threw his coat on the floor, then his jacket on top of it, and she tugged off his tie, her eyes half-shut; he pulled her t-shirt off over her head and kissed the small breasts he had longed to touch five nights ago. “Daniel,” she said again, “am I being stupid?” and again he insisted that he loved her, and he meant it even more the second time.

  In her bed, in the middle of everything, hail rattling the windows and a humid, pre-war heat blanketing the room, Daniel whispered, “Thank you so much, Susan” He immediately regretted this heartfelt expression of gratitude, and Susan pretended not to hear.

  That night, a New York journalist sat in his chair in a little room at a Washington television studio, staring at the monitors, rehearsing his applause lines, thinking intensely about one of the very last spots on the globe where the United States and Russia were still at war. Senator Stephen Solomon came into the room, sat down in his chair, stared at the television monitors and, the journalist imagined, rehearsed his own applause lines. The two men didn’t speak to one another. They were here tonight because of Cambodia, the ancient nation, which now smoldered.

  In 1971, the journalist was covering the Vietnam war in Cambodia; he was there when the massacres began. He filed reports on the carnage in Asia and read reports from the United States about Rep. Solomon, the new, hawkish Congressman from Brooklyn, who called the bombing “glorious,” and had made his name by seeming to revel in the war. So when Solomon set about starting a new war in Cambodia, the journalist, whose prominence had also grown, became Senator Solomon’s enemy in the press and his frequent debater on Sunday morning public affairs shows. But lately, the journalist knew, his message was getting lost. The senator’s perceived expertise, the journalist believed, was directly proportional to his enthusiasm. Solomon had the required energy, he was giddy over reports from the field, troop gains, government defections, the weakness of Cambodia’s “socialist economy.” The journalist felt only an increasingly hopeless weariness as each new day of war dawned. What had happened to the friends he had made, the Cambodian professors, historians and artists who had helped him to understand the country? He didn’t know for certain, but no letters had reached him in the years since the massacres, so he assumed they were gone, all of them. How could he now give the sort of wittily sarcastic, bombastic performance that might match the political theater for which Senator Solomon was famous? He could not; and so while he would win the wonks, the Mondale and Stevenson voters, Solomon would win the farmers in Kansas.

  The theme music sounded, and the two men heard the arrogant voice of their moderator, a Kissinger Republican with bad hair and disgust for everything and everyone with which he came into contact. His voice boomed from a speaker, but they could not see him. The moderator preferred things this way. It gave him an advantage. It threw his guests off-balance. It made him look smart.

  The moderator introduced a news report, which detailed the infamous history of the Khmer Rouge rebels and briefly discussed the new request Senator Solomon had made for aid to the U.S.-backed coalition seeking to overthrow the Soviet-backed Cambodian government. He then addressed the journalist.

  “Senator Solomon says that those who oppose the aid to the rebels are Leninist-sympathizers,” he said. “He says this is the only way of bringing democracy to Cambodia. He says you are a Communist. How do you respond?”

  The journalist gasped. “That’s your opening question?” he asked, dumb-founded. “How do you think I respond?”

  “The senator alleges – ”

  “I went to Cambodia, and I saw what happened the last time the Khmer Rouge controlled the country. People killed for wearing eyeglasses. Families destroyed. You’re not going to bring democracy to Cambodia by sending aid to the Khmer Rouge.”

  Solomon didn’t look at his opponent. Staring into the camera’s lens, the Senator explained gently that he supported the non-communist elements of a Khmer Rouge dominated coalition fighting to free its nation from a Stalinist-Leninist dictatorship. Those who opposed this plan were in the Cambodian government’s camp. Communist sympathizers.

  The journalist began an analysis of the dire consequences of the Solomon Doctrine – the senator wasn’t even listening – but by the time the moderator interrupted with a booming Get to the point please sir!, Solomon smiled with satisfaction. “I thought that by the time he finished that answer, the war would be over,” he laughed.

  “My god,” the journalist said, “if only this war could be over.”

  “Listen,” the senator said, “I know how terrible war can be.”

  “How?” the journalist demanded. “How do you know how terrible war can be?”

  “I’ve seen the pictures.”

  “Senator, Pol Pot was responsible for one holocaust, and if you help him get back into power, he may do it again.”

  The senator performed a carefully nuanced double-take, filled with shock. The television studio was utterly silent.

  “Excuse me, my friend,” Solomon said with contempt, “I’m a Jew, and no one needs to lecture me about genocide. When you use the Holocaust that my people suffered for cheap political gain, you devalue the lives of the men, women and children who died under Hitler.” Now he turned to the journalist and stared at him: “Have you no shame, sir?”

  The journalist was momentarily stunned.

  “I’m a Jew too,” he stammered. He gazed helplessly into the senator’s eyes. “I didn’t say the Holocaust. I said a holocaust.” Was he really going to lose this debate? Solomon turned back to the camera.

  “Tm working to make the world a safer place,” he said, “to relieve people of their suffering, and you can’t do that by supporting Communism, as these apologists advocate. I’m working to cultivate international relationships where others would ask us to shut our eyes. I spoke just this morning with D’Aubuisson, in El Salvador, and we discussed his brave, very lonely struggle against Communism in his country. I have consistently supported the contra war against Nicaragua, where Sandinista supporters like my friend here were insisting in print that mining their harbors was a ‘violation of the law.’ I went to Angola, and I had tea with Jonas Savimbi, a true, noble democrat if I ever met one. In just one month, I am going to fly to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein, to see
what I can do to help him in his struggle against Islamo-Marxist extremism. You know, this guy and his ultra leftist-Leninist friends in the press would have asked us to just abandon Saddam Hussein, to cut off aid to his nation, to let his people starve, and to let the Iranian-Marxist extremists encroach on his sovereignty.”

  Senator Solomon took a deep breath and he turned to the journalist. “Now we have the same chance that Prime Minister Chamberlain had forty-five years ago: to stop a tyrant in his tracks. The Cambodian Prime Minister is a monster – he is as bad – no worse, he is worse than Hitler! – and you would ask us to allow him to live.

  “Have you no shame sir, at long last?” Senator Solomon said gently, with deep, feigned regret. “Have you no shame?”

  And Stephen Solomon left the studio, knowing he had hit a bulls-eye, grinning, practically skipping with glee. He hopped in a cab, sped to another part of town, ran shamelessly up the stairs to a sixth floor apartment – not even stopping to catch his breath, he was that excited – and three doors to the right of the stairwell he entered the warm embrace of a woman not his spouse, fell into her arms, enveloped her, breathed her warm breath, looked into those eyes – those warm trusting loving eyes that a few short years later would capture the imagination and admiration of a nation tired of war and death and hypocrisy, those eyes and that fleeting smile, which would enchant the old and the young, the leftists and the religious right – and not knowing what dwelled beyond this young lover’s admiring gaze, Senator Solomon sank deeply into tranquil delirium.

  A few hundred miles away, his wife baked pound cake, for no particular reason, at two in the morning.

  Senator Solomon’s mistress was a woman named Joyce, who worked for a lobbying group representing the interests of wealthy gas and oil companies, and whose apartment was in the back of a building on a Georgetown side street; the windows looked out over a still, quiet alley, and the two rooms were immaculately clean and ordered. He’d met her as one might expect. Joyce exuded warmth; her smile was wide and white and convincing. Had anyone ever seen her with Solomon, her colorful demeanor would have seemed jarring alongside the pallor of his body and spirit.