Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “Right. Of course you don’t.” Rogers paused, like he knew he was about to unpack a difficult concept and wanted to give me an extra moment to gather myself.

  Then he said, “It may sound fantastical, but Mr. DeGange has the ability to understand how certain events will unfold with total and complete accuracy.”

  “He can see the future?” I said, duly incredulous.

  “Something like that. He can’t see everything in the future—just as no one can see everything in the present. But sometimes, especially when he really concentrates on a person or a subject, an idea about what will happen next arrives in his head. And he is able to recognize it as being valid.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  He said it as a statement, not a question.

  “Does it even matter? I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, and am being held against my will. What I believe doesn’t seem to have a lot of bearing on my current circumstances.”

  “But you’re skeptical.”

  “Of course I am,” I said.

  “You should be. I was just like you when I was first approached. It’s part of my job to convince you everything you’re about to hear is real. I know that’s probably impossible right away, so for now please listen with an open mind. Or, better yet, look around. As you can tell, Mr. DeGange has used his gift to amass an incredible fortune. But he’s also used it to help humanity, to save it from tragedy. And he has gathered around him a group of people who assist him in that endeavor. We’ve seen his predictions come true many times, enough that we know it couldn’t be a fluke or explicable by any other means. And now we follow his orders. We call ourselves ‘the Praesidium.’ That’s Latin for ‘protector.’”

  “The Praesidium,” I repeated. “So you’re the disciples, the true believers.”

  “I suppose so, though Mr. DeGange strongly discourages the use of sacred language. The Praesidium is not a cult. Mr. DeGange does not claim to be a god. His abilities are a manifestation of science and evolution, not divinity.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “And what, exactly, does this nongod tell you to do?”

  “We’re getting to that. But please allow me to continue. It turns out that when a human being dies, there’s a dip in what Mr. DeGange refers to as the currents of the universe. But if you can make the opposite happen—if you can save the life in question—there’s a rise. When that occurs, when a dip is replaced with a rise, it creates a ripple in the currents. Most of us have no awareness of these ripples whatsoever. But Mr. DeGange can feel them. Do you follow me?”

  “He has a sixth sense.”

  “Yes. Very good. And now we get back around to why I started with the ethical question that I did. The ripples are very powerful. And Mr. DeGange can not only sense them; he has developed a kind of instinct for understanding what will trigger them. In particular, Mr. DeGange is sometimes able to foresee when eliminating one person in the present can avert a much larger catastrophe in the future, thus saving many lives.”

  “Eliminating as in . . . killing them?”

  “That’s right,” Rogers said. “Though, by most people’s moral calculations, it’s an act that is completely justified.”

  I looked at the Rembrandt above the fireplace. A seventeenth-century man with an agonized expression stared back at me.

  “All right, Rogers. Let’s just say for sake of argument I’ve bought in. Your boss saves lives by killing people. What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Actually,” he said, “it has to do with your wife.”

  CHAPTER 2

  JENNY

  Jenny had not visited this exact house before. Just a lot like it.

  It was shotgun-style, sided in yellow clapboard, with an asphalt roof many years past its sell-by date. The properties on either side contained familiar markers of urban decay: concrete front steps to nowhere, the dwellings they once led to having long ago been demolished.

  A pair of basketball shoes with the laces tied together hung from a nearby power line. An advertisement of sorts. Not for sneakers.

  Jenny had been out to this neighborhood often enough that she didn’t pay much attention. Nor was she bothered by the two teenagers at the corner gawking at the white lady in the tailored navy-blue skirt suit who clearly didn’t belong in this part of town.

  When you’re a six-foot-tall woman—and you reached your adult height in the eighth grade—you get used to the stares. And you either shrink your shoulders, put on flats, and pretend you really couldn’t beat the boys at basketball; or you eventually learn to do what Jenny did.

  Carry yourself with pride. Wear heels. And kick everyone’s ass.

  The other partners at Carter, Morgan & Ross hated that Jenny Welker came out here, to this derelict section of Richmond’s East End. Why didn’t she send an associate or a paralegal? Or outsource this part to some ham-and-egg attorney with what they delicately termed to be “local knowledge”—read: dark skin—who would sign up clients in exchange for a small bounty?

  Better yet, why didn’t she just drop this Hail Mary loser of a lawsuit to begin with?

  But Jenny was generating enough revenue elsewhere that she could afford to take on a passion project. Plus, the potential dollar figures involved made this a long shot worth taking.

  It had started two years earlier as a pro bono case by one of the associates Jenny supervised. The client was a woman with terminal lung cancer who was being given a hard time by her insurance company.

  Then her pastor mentioned that this was his fifth parishioner to be diagnosed with lung cancer in the last two years. And, wasn’t it strange, none of them smoked.

  That one offhand comment had launched the associate, and then Jenny herself, into what was now a mass action tort claim with 279 clients—and growing.

  And, sure, Jenny could have relied on underlings to sign up number 280. But she had never wanted to practice what she thought of as database law, where the plaintiffs existed as little more than names on a spreadsheet. She felt that getting to know her clients—and their families, and their suffering—would allow her to more passionately advocate on their behalf.

  Plus, she liked the people here. At heart, she was still a farmer’s daughter. And the folks in this neighborhood reminded her of her neighbors in Surry, the rural Virginia county where she grew up. They didn’t necessarily have the polish or sophistication of an equity partner at Carter, Morgan & Ross. But they also didn’t have the self-importance, the mindlessly unexamined privilege, or the unabashed pretentiousness.

  They were real.

  And so she climbed up to the front porch of the house on North Twenty-Second Street that belonged to Clyde and Danece Henderson. Ignoring the POSTED: NO TRESPASSING sign, she knocked on the door.

  A rheumy-eyed man a few inches shorter than Jenny answered the door.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Mr. Henderson?” Jenny asked hopefully.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Jenny Welker. I’m with Carter, Morgan, and Ross.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you get the letter I sent you and your wife?”

  “You the lawyer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yeah, I got your letter,” he said, without allowing any indication as to what he might have thought about it.

  She was, by now, accustomed to the guardedness. It was the same thing an outsider faced in Surry, where it was generally accepted that educated, well-dressed people only came around to take advantage of the locals.

  “Do you mind if I come in so we can talk about it?” Jenny asked.

  Henderson cast a glance over his shoulder. “Afraid my wife isn’t feeling very well.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But that’s why I’m here.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Hang on. Let me tell her we got company.”

  Henderson closed the door behind himself, leaving Jenny alone on the front porch. One of the kids from the corner, now on
a bike, was riding past for another look.

  She dipped her head toward him. He pedaled harder, leaving the gesture unacknowledged.

  Perhaps two minutes later, the front door opened.

  “Come on,” Henderson said.

  Jenny followed him inside and to the left, where a small living room was dominated by a bed. The room smelled of peppermint air freshener and terminal illness.

  The woman sitting up in bed—propped on some pillows, trying to look dignified—was obviously Danece Henderson. According to public records, Danece was fifty-eight. She looked twenty years older. Her salt-and-pepper hair was thin enough that the light from a nearby lamp bounced off her scalp.

  A clear tube fastened under her nose led to an oxygen tank next to the bed.

  Jenny introduced herself again.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Been better,” Danece said. “Can’t get up the stairs no more. That’s why I’m down here.”

  “I understand you’ve been diagnosed with COPD?”

  Danece nodded. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was an umbrella term covering a number of conditions that affected breathing. It was a fancy way of saying your lungs were slowly dying. None of the diseases associated with COPD had a true cure, just varying rates at which they killed you.

  “And you never smoked, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Danece said.

  Jenny turned toward Clyde. “And you never smoked either.”

  “Little bit when I was in the army, before we got together. But not in a long time.”

  “Then you’re really perfect candidates to join our lawsuit,” Jenny said. “Did you read that letter I sent?”

  Clyde looked uncomfortably at his wife, then back to Jenny.

  “We read it,” he said. “Can’t say a lot of it really sank in. I been getting a lot of letters lately. Most of them from people saying we owe them money. Gets so I don’t want to go to the mailbox no more. Between the medical bills and Danece not being able to work . . . it’s been tough. We’re four months behind on the rent too. Landlord keeps threatening us. If we get kicked out of here, I don’t know where we gonna go.”

  “I understand,” Jenny said. “Let me just start at the beginning. Commonwealth Power and Light has a coal-fired electricity plant not far from here, in Upper Shockoe Valley. It’s an old plant, one of the oldest in the country, actually. Even with some of the modern scrubbers they’ve installed, the smoke that spews out of it is very dirty, filled with mercury, lead, all kinds of other heavy metals, and pollutants. We have experts who can prove that under prevailing wind patterns, a lot of that smoke falls right around where you live. We have other experts who will testify it’s making people sick—with lung cancer, COPD, asthma, things like that—and that those illnesses are unusually concentrated in this area, to a degree that simply wouldn’t happen if the Shockoe Generation Plant weren’t where it is. Have you ever seen Erin Brockovich?”

  “That’s that movie with what’s-her-name,” Clyde said.

  “Julia Roberts,” Danece said.

  “Exactly,” Jenny said. “That was all about water making people sick. This lawsuit is similar, except it’s with air.”

  Clyde’s attention had been fixed on Jenny. Now he was looking at his wife.

  “So her lungs, this is because of them. The power company.”

  “We believe so, yes.”

  “And what’s this gonna cost us, joining your lawsuit?” Danece asked.

  “Nothing. All the up-front expenses associated with the suit will be borne by my law firm. The firm will get one-third of whatever we recoup from CP and L, after expenses. If we lose, no one gets anything.”

  “And if we win?” Clyde asked.

  “If we are able to determine CP and L is responsible, there will be a separate calculation done for each plaintiff to determine damages.”

  She went through some of the factors. Loss of income. Medical bills—past, present, and future. Pain and suffering. A life-care plan, so that as Danece’s condition worsened, she could have someone come in to help care for her. Loss of consortium for Clyde.

  Jenny stressed that this was all just an estimate, that nothing was in any way guaranteed, that even if they got a favorable judgment, they would have to fight for every dime as CP&L appealed.

  But then she spit out the final number she had added up in her head.

  $1.5 million.

  Neither of the Hendersons immediately responded. The only sound in the room was Danece laboring to suck oxygen into her ruined lungs.

  But Jenny had been doing this long enough. She could see the answer on their faces.

  Clyde already had tears in his eyes.

  CHAPTER 3

  NATE

  As soon as Rogers said the words your wife, an electric current ran through my spine. The hair on my arms stood up.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “You are, of course, aware of the lawsuit she’s working on.”

  “Which one? The one with the power company?”

  “Yes. According to Mr. DeGange, it’s going to be successful. Too successful.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “In a few days’ time—Saturday morning at eight twenty-eight a.m., to be exact—she is going to brainstorm a novel legal argument that has never before been applied to the Clean Air Act. It will not only result in her winning this lawsuit against Commonwealth Power and Light; it will bring a massive wave of tort claims against power companies all over America. Think of the asbestos lawsuits of the seventies and eighties, only on an even larger scale, because more people live near power plants and breathe the air. Hungry lawyers will race to sign up plaintiffs. Power companies will realize they can no longer afford to release coal pollutants into the atmosphere.”

  “Well, that’s got to be a good thing, right?” I said. “How many Americans die as a result of pollution from coal-fired power plants? Jenny has shown me the numbers. It’s something like thirteen thousand a year. She would be saving them. That’s a lot of good ripples for your boss to feel, right?”

  Rogers shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the law of unintended consequences.”

  I felt another electric shock when he said unintended.

  “Coal is still responsible for about thirty percent of the electric energy generated in America,” Rogers said. “It’s an enormous amount of energy. People like to say, ‘Oh, just stop burning coal,’ but it’s much harder to actually do. You can’t expect power companies to tell their customers to stop using their air conditioners and refrigerators. What the power companies will do instead is come up with a powerful new scrubbing mechanism. It will be cheap, relatively easy to install, and will make it safe to burn coal.”

  “Again, this sounds like a positive development.”

  More headshaking. “This scrubbing mechanism will require sodium hexafluoride. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Uhh, no.”

  “It’s a highly effective insulator. It’s also the most devastating greenhouse gas ever created—twenty-four thousand times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And it stays in the atmosphere for up to three thousand years.”

  Rogers stopped talking for a moment, allowing his words to accumulate weight.

  I had nothing to say. The place in my neck where his tranquilizer dart had hit me was throbbing gently.

  He continued: “According to Mr. DeGange, the greatly increased production and use of sodium hexafluoride will result in the earth’s atmosphere reaching a tipping point in the year 2029, triggering several runaway feedback mechanisms. By 2040, the planet will be eight degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrialized levels. Eight degrees Celsius, Nate. That’s fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. The results will be even more profoundly devastating than the worst doomsday scenarios being laid out by the climate change alarmists of today. The seas will rise not by the inches we worry about now, b
ut by several hundred feet. Major cities, including New York and Boston, will be completely submerged. Florida will disappear. So will entire archipelagos in the Pacific. Storms of unimaginable intensity will become commonplace and weather patterns will become wildly unrecognizable.

  “Crop yields will plummet. The global system of trade that we rely on for our way of life will cease almost overnight, in a way that will make the coronavirus shutdown look like a hiccup. There will be enormous flows of displaced people that will create a breakdown in civil order. Europe will be anarchy. Most of Asia will revert to feudalism. Hundreds of millions of people in India and China will starve to death. Africa will be even worse off. Roughly half of the people on the continent, about seven hundred million, will die from either famine or war. The breadbasket of the world will become Russia, as huge swaths of Siberia suddenly become arable. But Russia will be an even more despotic kleptocracy than it is now, and it will hold the world hostage through the use of food, pitting crumbling nation against crumbling nation—”

  “Okay, okay, okay, stop,” I finally said. “It’ll be bad. I get it.”

  Rogers had rattled all this off in an easy monotone, like he was narrating a documentary.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’re telling me any of this.”

  “Because Jenny is the linchpin to all of this.”

  “And?”

  “It’s quite simple, really,” he said. “We want you to kill her.”

  He delivered the line plainly, with no embellishment.

  I expected a promulgation of this magnitude to be accompanied by something else. Lights flashing. Walls shaking. Some special effect or supernatural revelation.

  That didn’t happen.

  Next I thought perhaps my mouth would go dry or my heart would start thrashing against my chest. The words would fully sink in, and panic would begin cascading through me.

  That didn’t happen either.

  Instead, my first reaction was very measured. Judicial even. The former lawyer in me kicked in. At this moment, Rogers and I were just two people sitting on opposite sides of a table with very different ideas about how matters should proceed.