by Don Gillmor
As Harry drove past the ancient distillery, a sprawling collection of brick buildings from the nineteenth century that was used by film companies to approximate a dystopic Europe, his cellphone rang. He picked up, optimistically thinking it might be Dixie calling back to reconcile already.
“Harry, it’s August. I didn’t really have a chance to talk to you at the office. So I’m just calling to say how much I thought of your father. He was steady as a rock. All those years.”
August’s voice was monotone, as if he were reading from a script.
“It’s good of you to call, August. I appreciate it.”
“You know, Harry, you were in the office, talking about your father’s estate …”
“I don’t know that you can call it an estate.”
August was silent, not quite long enough for Harry to ask if he was still there.
“Was there something you wanted to tell me, August?”
After another pause, August said, “You know, about thirty years ago we went on a fishing trip, down to Florida. Me, your dad, some clients. Fishing for tarpon. We were out in this boat, fishing and drinking in that sun. We weren’t having much luck, and we left to find another spot. We were moving pretty fast over the water, and Bennett Cain, a client, he’d been drinking quite a bit and he fell off the boat. Like hitting cement at that speed. This was before everyone wore life preservers all the time. Your father was about half a second behind him. Jumped over the side and swam to where Cain was already sinking. Your dad saved him.”
Harry turned up past some pawnshops and August’s voice was suddenly distorted.
“I’m having trouble hearing you, August.”
“I just want you to know that this business wasn’t always like this, Harry. Your father, he was a good man. We were all good men.”
Static sounds.
“What?” Harry said.
August said something that sounded like Dale susceptor.
“I’m losing you,” Harry said.
Why had August called? Harry wondered. A deathbed confession, perhaps. He pushed Redial. There was no answer.
ELEVEN
ON HIS WAY TO THE UNIVERSITY, Harry pondered the unfairness of his life. He hadn’t been unsuccessful, had worked as a reasonably well-known journalist for a formerly prestigious public television station, was employed as a professor (albeit untenured), had a lovely wife who he still wanted to fuck after more than twenty years of marriage, though she didn’t seem to want to fuck him back. Still, he chalked up his desire for her as an accomplishment of sorts. Maybe the sterile patch they were mired in at the moment was only a temporary and inevitable phase in a long relationship. His one indiscretion still put him in what he guessed to be the top tenth percentile for morality in this city.
But it was irksome that without what he had come to regard as his rightful inheritance, his modest success looked for all the world like failure. He had called August Sampson again, but had been unable to reach him. He wondered if August was in a hospital.
While it wasn’t entirely a relief to be back teaching after his condolence leave, it did give him some comfort to feel employed again. Though his mind was on money as he surveyed the faces of his students and absently guessed at the student loans they carried, what their chances were of paying them back before they turned forty (slim), what kind of job market waited for them (cramped, confusing and competitive), what kind of post-sexual revolution lurked.
Harry’s students had the glossy, drugged faces of privilege. Today’s lecture was on the Family Compact, the group of families that had controlled Upper Canadian politics for decades in the nineteenth century, the cozy exclusion and casual corruption of Protestant Tories. That arrogance had led to rebellion. The people rose up! Would these students rise up, Harry wondered, this generation that had a statistical voter turnout of twenty-eight percent? What would galvanize Briscow in his FUCK THE WHALES T-shirt, or Melanie, whose hair appeared as a new sculpture every week; what would incite them to take up arms?
“Imagine you’re a citizen of this city in 1828,” Harry began. “A sexless city in black and white, a colonial outpost with airs and cholera. The legislative assembly has no real power; the elected officials are empty suits. The power still comes from London, and it is apportioned to Anglican Tories, who use it like a sword.
“It was William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scot, who coined the term ‘the Family Compact.’ He was denounced as a reptile, a combustible redhead. The sons of Toronto’s finest families dressed up as Natives and broke into the office where Mackenzie printed his newspaper and smashed his printing press and then threw it into the harbour. Mackenzie sued and won and got a new press and began a larger newspaper operation. ‘To die fighting for freedom is truly glorious!’ he wrote. ‘Who would live and die a slave? Never never never!’
“Does this remind you of anything?” Harry asked the class. “Briscow? What are your thoughts?”
Briscow was on the brink of sleep. “Yes?” Briscow stared at him, blinking.
“Mackenzie. Rising up against the rich and powerful. What does it bring to mind?”
Briscow’s blank, helpless face.
“Well, the Occupy movement.” This from Verma, one of the few bright lights. She was wearing a modified sari and leggings and a wool watch cap. “It’s basically the same scenario, isn’t it?”
“Have you been down there,” Harry asked, “with the protesters?”
“I’ve spent a little time.”
“What do you think the impact has been so far, Verma?”
“We brought attention to a critical problem.”
“And what was the result of that attention?”
“You’re going to say that nothing has changed,” Verma said.
“It’s a bit early, perhaps.” Harry said. “An inequity that has existed for centuries was highlighted. Grievances were aired.”
Verma said, “We’ve had coverage in the media every day.”
“But will it lead to change?” Harry asked. “For a revolution, you need two things. You need preconditions, and you need a precipitant. It’s not enough that people are oppressed. Something has to set them off. Who starts revolutions? The people? That’s the myth, isn’t it? They rise up as one. They’re tired of being cheated, being hungry, whatever. They rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime.
“But the great gift of the people, the great sad gift, is their ability to adjust to almost anything. So they endure. They live with the horrible inequities, the mouldy bread, the shortages, the unfairness of it all. They trudge home and make dismal Russian jokes, or pray to a flinty Highland god, they pay the soul-destroying taxes.
“What makes a revolution is someone coming along and making people believe that things could change. You have to understand that the idea of change isn’t just foreign, it’s inconceivable. There is no model for it, either in their restricted worlds or in their restricted imaginations. Someone has to create that world, they have to draw the outline and colour it in and then sell it to thousands of people who are without hope and ammunition.”
“But the people are rising up,” Verma said.
“The issue is whether they’ll subside again.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t do anything?”
“Not at all, Verma. It’s admirable to join in. But in the end, when you all go home, will anything have changed? The dogs bark and the parade passes.”
“But it is something.”
“It is. But what is it? You have the head of one of the major banks coming down to the site, a man whose annual salary is just south of $12 million, offering public support for the protesters. Maybe his media coach recognized it as a good PR move. But he’s still making $12 million.”
“What are you saying?” Verma said. “That there has to be blood in the streets? We have to burn the banks down?”
“Mackenzie promised to burn Rosedale,” Harry said. “At the time, it wasn’t a neighbourhood, simply a house, the house of William Botsford J
arvis, Sheriff of the Home District and staunch defender of the Crown. But it was a symbol.
“Mackenzie hated Jarvis; Jarvis hated Mackenzie. Most revolutions get personal at some point. But a colonel in Mackenzie’s army—Samuel Lount—said he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t burn the house. Jarvis’s wife, Mary, and two of her sick children were inside at the time and he couldn’t torch it: he would not fight women and children. Lount was later hanged by Jarvis. Hanging the man who spares your wife. Maybe their marriage wasn’t going brilliantly.”
Briscow put up his hand now, but Harry galloped ahead.
“Mary Jarvis used to ride her horse in the mornings. Perhaps she rode as distraction. She was lonely. It was a great century for loneliness in this country. For a while, theirs was the only house in the neighbourhood. Maybe the love was gone and she rode slowly through the ravines thinking of ways to cook her husband’s heart.”
His students obliged him with a titter.
“Mackenzie sits in our history as a hero. But how much actually changed? The elasticity of the ruling class is epic. They make a few concessions and regroup. The Occupy movements are widespread, but there hasn’t been any change in banking policy or tax policy. After the crash of 2008, there weren’t any indictments; the one percent is still the one percent. The people have been heard and the regime is intact.”
The occupation of St. James Park reminded him of an anti-nuclear march he’d participated in as a student. That sense of solidarity when hundreds walked down Yonge Street, blocking traffic. A feeling of righteousness and malicious glee at bringing the world to a halt. That brief confederacy, the promise of sex. But the nuclear world marched on regardless.
“Here is an exercise. You’ll all go down to St. James Park and talk with the protesters. Gauge the mood. Is this a revolt? Is this simply posturing? What do you think will be accomplished? Go on your own if you have a chance this week—who knows how long it will last? And then, for our next class, we’ll meet down there, beside the gazebo.”
Harry looked up at the clock. It was 11:20 a.m. Another forty minutes before the students would stand up and their faces would go by in a blur of ennui, leaving him alone in the starched fluorescent light.
After class, Harry walked to his office and called Tommy Bladdock. He had already dropped the files and whatever he’d found in Dale’s apartment off at Bladdock’s office and was surprised to see that the accountant was a muscular man in a tight polo shirt. He had expected a human mole.
“Tommy, it’s Harry. Just checking in. Was there anything in that paper?”
“The paper isn’t much help—it’s been scrubbed. But I found his other trading accounts. And we may catch a break. Word is, the Securities Commission is looking at BRG. I have a guy there, and I’m hoping he’ll share.”
“I don’t know how much more cash I can—”
“We can work that out later. First, your father. There are two trading accounts. Dale was heavily into Pathos, as you mentioned, but it looks like he got quite a bit out before it cratered. You can see here, there is $1,287,321.80 in cash in one account. There was still a pile of Pathos, pretty much worthless, and almost two million in bank stocks, utilities, gas, all dividend. In July—”
“He was in the hospital then.”
“In what kind of condition?”
“Dying, suffering from dementia.”
“Well, in that condition, he allegedly cashed out what was left through different trading accounts. The total would be just north of three million.”
“Where did it go?”
“We don’t know. But we will. Maybe someone was operating a Ponzi out of BRG.”
“That seems unlikely, Tommy. BRG is very quiet. Old money.”
“What are they spitting out for their clients annually, forty, forty-five million?”
“Bit more, maybe.
“Anyway, there’s a trail. A little thin, but …”
“Well, thanks, Tommy. Keep me posted.”
“You’ll be the first.”
He had paid Tommy a $1,200 retainer, and the meter was running. It was like buying five hundred lottery tickets. What were the odds? But action, Harry reasoned, even expensive and fruitless action, was still preferable to inaction.
When he got home, Harry went online and checked his anemic retirement account. He might need to plunder it so he and Gladys could get by. Financial people said that was the single worst financial move you could make. The money taken out would be taxed, for one thing. And the fund was already woefully inadequate for his retirement. But what were his options?
When Harry was fifteen, he took the money that was in his bank account—the accumulated birthday cash from his grandmother, mostly, almost $1,900—and invested it in the market. The three therapists Harry had briefly seen since posited that he was either trying to win his father’s approval by entering Dale’s arena and excelling, or he was trying to kill his father by making money at the very thing Dale made money at, thus sending the message that Dale was redundant and Harry was now the man of the house.
He put all of his savings in an asbestos mine, on the vague advice of a broker he’d talked to while bartending at one of his parents’ parties. It was high-risk, high-gain, the man said. Harry heard only the high-gain part. With the windfall, he planned to buy a Jaguar when he turned sixteen and impress Jennifer Summers when he gracefully wheeled into the school parking lot wearing leather driving gloves with holes at the knuckle. He would show his mother-hitting father that making money on the market was child’s play. But asbestos chose that moment to go from miracle substance (It’s fireproof! It’s light! It’s cheap!) to carcinogen.
Since then, Harry had been mildly unsuccessful as an investor. The banks had reliably climbed, but he’d been gutted by mining fraud. Conservative and diversified—this was the philosophy he had been born into, and he had attempted to embrace it, though a part of him still held to the One Great Stock theory, the idea that a substantial (though not suicidal) leap into a brilliant start-up would be his deliverance. He had tried it twice since his asbestos adventure, with hydrogen fuel cells (O HydroDyne, you radical purveyor of cutting-edge poverty) and pharmaceuticals (BioNute, you opaque ethical sewer). So he was skittish. Still, he now found himself hovering around a Chinese manufacturer of solar panels, the familiar logic nagging. First, it was Chinese, a synonym for growth and technology. Second, it was on the right side of history. However fossil fuels ended—bang or whimper—eventually they would end, and something would replace them. Evidently not the hydrogen fuel cells he had bet $27,000 on. But if the Chinese government willed SunRise Inc. to rise up, it would rise up. It was traded on the New York exchange and had almost doubled since it had come onto Harry’s radar two months ago, going from $5.12 to $9.81. You want to be on that rocket when the Chinese government dictates that the future is solar.
Solar power would give China independence from foreign oil sources—untrustworthy Arabs, flaky Venezuelan socialist dictators, African nations that could collapse by brunch. It would give the immoral Chinese moral and (yet more) financial leverage over the amoral Americans. Cheap, abundant energy would keep its 1.4 billion restless citizens in line and would feed the insatiable domestic economy. And solar was green: the heavy blanket of particulate smog that covered most of Shandong Province, resulting in an estimated 770,000 lung disease–related deaths a year (the UN’s admittedly dodgy stats), would gradually dissipate. This wasn’t a stock that was, in any real way, driven by market forces. And these, Harry knew from the bitter experience of not owning them, were the best kind.
What if he put twenty grand into SunRise and it went up tenfold? This still left him with a disappointing number. If he put in fifty K and it went up twelvefold? This was better. Six hundred grand. Sixty and fourteen—and he would cut the fantasy off there.
While he waited on SunRise, Harry was betting on the apocalypse. It was a strategy that was freighted with obvious ironies. The world had to approach collapse—it had to resem
ble a Bosch painting—in order for Harry to profit. His first move had been to put money into the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund, a safe haven. The index was based on the price of several food staples—beef, coffee, corn and wheat among them. He reasoned, as all investors in the index must have, that we would always need food. Populations were growing, and the price of food would go up. It did, in fact, go up. Food was more expensive than it had been since 1854, the year its cost was first calculated. In 2008, the number of the world’s hungry, which had been on the wane, increased. The reason for this was attributed to the false economy created by the various commodities index funds, which had made some people a great deal of money but further impoverished others.
The details blurred. He wondered how much of this was true. The media was prone to drawing crude causal lines between events, then pronouncing with authority.
His other hedge was water. Bread and water, that prison metaphor. What is more elemental than water? Our bodies are made up of it (oddly, men’s bodies have a greater percentage than women’s; perhaps all the tears women shed). Here was a necessary commodity (unlike that imposter, gold), and a diminishing commodity. It was transparent and familiar and increasingly politicized. Several aquifers had collapsed in the U.S., and the Americans were quietly looking north, not for the first time. California and Texas could be approaching End Days in terms of looming water shortages. The Ogallala Aquifer, which gave life to the Midwestern agricultural belt, was shrinking rapidly. When this reached a critical mass, there would be a destabilizing period when water would be much more valuable than oil or gold. Harry had done his homework, as his father had once instructed him. Rainfall in the Brazilian rainforest was down more than twenty-three percent over the last sixteen years. Worldwide, desert habitats had encroached on more than 1,682,000 square kilometres of vaguely arable land in less than twenty years. The Athabasca Glacier, the hydroponic apex of North America, which fed three oceans (Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic), had lost half its volume since 1844 and was retreating by more than two inches every day; you could actually stand there and watch it disappear. There was a tour group in Banff that organized gourmet lunches at the base of the glacier so you could watch it go. There were more than a dozen countries where political stability was already tenuous and water shortages were imminent. You could plot on a graph where these two lines would meet and suddenly there would be madness on an unimaginable scale. China’s wheat belt was disappearing due to pollution of groundwater and the accelerating usage by rampant industry. The situation was likely much worse than China admitted. Las Vegas could return to desert as Lake Mead continued to evaporate and the Colorado River continued to shrink. In the north, the Athabasca River was being plundered by the oil sands and could disappear in a decade.