“He’s not.” Jonah shook his head decisively. “Not like before. He doesn’t even say what happened.”
“What do you mean? Does he make you afraid?”
“I’m not scared of him, he’s just … weird. All spacey and distracted. And … like that first night, when he told about that guy getting his jaw broken and stuff? It’s like he was totally cold. Like he could care less.”
Jonah looked up, his eyes pleading. Allison softened. Her own feelings for Brendan were complicated enough. Why wouldn’t Jonah be getting mixed signals too? “I’m going to pay closer attention,” she said. “You’ve known Brendan your whole life. I need to trust there might be something you’re picking up on.”
“Next time I could chill with Buzz.”
Allison held back a smile. “Now that’d be double trouble.”
“What’s wrong with Buzz?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Buzz, but he’s not an adult. How about if Natalie or Gregor came upstairs when no one else is home?”
“Whatever.” Jonah shut his book and flopped back against a heap of pillows. “How was karate?”
“I enjoyed it, though I have to admit it’s hard to change gears after work. It’s generous of Sensei Okano to let me teach, but pivoting from preschool to sparring can be a little odd.”
“But you’ve been teaching that class since summer. Aren’t you used to it?”
“Nine months isn’t so long in the scheme of things.”
Jonah tapped a quick rhythm across the pages of his textbook. “Did I tell you what Buzz and me thought of?”
“‘Buzz and I.’ Tell me now,” Allison said.
“You know how Duboce Park is all full of dog poop, right?”
“Like a minefield.”
“Exactly. So me and Buzz want to countermine.”
“Um … I hope you don’t mean what I’m thinking.”
Jonah’s eyes opened wide. “Mom, that’s disgusting!”
“So what’s your idea?”
“We’re going to sprinkle powder on the grass to make all the dogs go bald.”
“Mmmm … that seems kind of unfair.”
“To who?”
“To the dogs.”
Jonah leaned forward. “It’s unfair to mess up the park.”
“True, but the dogs are just being dogs. They don’t know any better.”
“Yeah, but the owners do. And they’d go totally nuts if their dogs went bald.”
“They’d be really worried,” Allison said. “But the dogs whose owners pick up would go just as bald as the ones whose people leave messes. And you’d probably kill the grass. Collateral damage.”
“Okay, those are problems.” Jonah considered. “But Buzz’ll want to do it anyway.”
“Do you think?”
“What would you do about the dogs?”
“It’s not about the dogs,” Allison said. Better, she thought. He was asking for advice now. She stood and started a series of leg stretches. “Do you mind?”
Jonah shook his head.
“If you want the owners to change,” Allison said, “I think your best bet is shame.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Say you’ve got a digital camera, one with a zoom lens.”
“Okay …”
“So you take pictures of dogs pooping next to their owners. If the owner picks up after the dog, you delete the pictures.”
“And if not, we put up posters of who’s making the mess!”
Allison switched from her right leg to her left. “That’d work.”
“We can make captions … like Dirty Dog.”
“Crappy Neighbor.”
Jonah giggled. “Filthy Fido!”
“Incontinence is for the Birds.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, that one’s a throwaway.”
—
She came down the back stairs after getting Jonah settled. As she entered the kitchen the others were engaged in heated discussion. Nora turned to her. “Al, you remember that mouse, right? With an ear cloned onto its back?”
“Of course I remember.” Everybody was sprawled around the table, except for Zac who was still at work, pulling espressos at Café Royal. She lit a burner under the kettle.
“Grafted, not cloned,” Brendan said.
Allison caught the wink he threw to Christopher, having beaten him to the punch. Boys and their rivalries. “But a soul-shaking image,” she said.
“Grafted, cloned—whatever.” Nora’s round cheeks dimpled with exasperation. “That photo boosted visibility of the danger in biotech more than anything before or since. That’s the point. Am I right, Allison?”
“What are you guys scrapping about?” Allison asked.
“But the mouse wasn’t genetically engineered,” Christopher said, sidestepping Allison’s question.
“The mouse was bred for low immune response,” Marty said. “You’re right on the fine print, Chris, but—”
“Let’s stay real,” Nora said. “Technical correctness matters, but it’s only a fraction of what we do. People who know nothing about tissue engineering remember that poor little mouse. On a sign or a banner, the right photo is worth ten thousand footnotes.” She held Christopher’s gaze for a long moment, then turned to Allison. “That’s what we’re scrapping about.”
Christopher looked down into his lap. Allison raised an eyebrow and gestured faintly toward his end of the table. Nora pretended not to notice that she had stung Christopher sharply.
“You’re all right,” Brendan said, smoothing the label on his bottle of lager. “Give the papers a juicy picture to put on the front page and they’ll use it. People form political ideas around images. But if industry PR forces a wedge between your image and your message, the whole thing backfires.”
“I’m not so sure.” Allison turned away from the others, speaking over her shoulder as she spooned green tea into a pot. “It comes back to the question of role. Is our action about getting attention, or about making an argument? And we’re not actually considering the mouse image, are we? We need something fresh.”
“Definitely not the mouse,” Christopher said quietly. “The question is whether we can come up with an image that’s fresh and honest. If we get attention for making a phony argument, we set everybody back.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Allison said, crossing back to the stove, conscious that she was shepherding her housecomrades no less deliberately than she’d talked Jonah down from his dog park conspiracy. “The question is, what’s ‘phony’? There’s a point of no return. My take is that we can make progress with a metaphor, short of qualifying every slogan. Once people get a picture in their head it’s hard to talk them out of it.”
“Exactly.” Nora crossed her arms defiantly.
“Ever since UMass showed off their three-eared wonder, nobody else has made the same ‘mistake,’” Christopher said. “So where’s this miracle image going to come from?”
“All I’m arguing is that we have to look,” Nora said “We have to look hard.”
“No harm looking,” Brendan said. “But say we develop materials that rely on having clear, graphic evidence of the slow, subtle threat of GMOs—and then suppose it doesn’t fall into our hands. If we lean too hard on finding an image, we’re screwed if it doesn’t pan out.”
Allison smiled to herself as she poured boiling water over her tea leaves. Brendan was including himself now: “we” instead of “you.”
“An image could put us over the top,” Christopher said, “but mainstream media isn’t going to be snookered by a home-hacked digital job. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was a hilarious spoof in the seventies, but B-grade spectacle won’t pass as serious politics. And if we rely on a photo but don’t find one, home-hacked is going to look like our only option at the eleventh hour.”
Nora was looking down at the table, picking at a paper napkin.
“How long can we take to look?” Allison asked.
Mar
ty rubbed his eyes. “Five weeks ’til GeneSynth opens. But I gotta fold laundry tonight.”
Brendan looked around the table. “A week or two for a search?”
“I can live with that,” Nora said. “Meantime the media committee drafts the pamphlet and press release. As agreed at tonight’s meeting.”
“How come you’re not writing this stuff?” Brendan asked Christopher. “Used to be we had to duct-tape your hands to give anybody else a chance.”
“Talk to the red pen.”
Allison pulled up a chair. “Chris, don’t be sour.”
“I’ll edit,” he said, shrugging. “I’m too overbooked to draft. Luis, the other guy in layout, is out on vacation.”
“Speaking of the Reporter,” Allison said, “is Leona quitting her gig at the paper? Now that she’s working for Meg?”
“I’m still in shock,” Nora said. “Leona’s the last person on Earth I’d have pegged for a Meg Wyneken stooge.”
“I saw her yesterday at the office,” Christopher said. “She’s taken the exact temperature of Meg’s fire. Leona’s not going over to the dark side.” He stood. “I need to get some stuff in the wash myself.”
“She’s young and she’s aimin’ for bigger prizes than Global Justice,” Marty said. “What the hell? I’d rather have fools with street cred in government than fools with degrees in business and law.”
Nora eyed her lover dubiously.
“Present company excepted, darlin’, you know that.”
“If she’s less than straight up we need to keep our distance,” Allison said.
“Isn’t it a little late?” Brendan drained his beer. “She knows … a partial plan, right?”
“Not enough to cause a problem,” Christopher said. “I’ll get commitments when the time’s right. And we can always pass faulty intelligence.”
“We want to point her away from the action,” Marty said.
“We’ve got timing, we’ve got target, we’ve got … the complexities,” Christopher said. “Let’s not talk about it here. Diversion shouldn’t be an issue.”
—
Marty preceded Christopher down the back stairs and into the basement’s murk. The dryer’s heat took no edge off the chill; their laundry room was ten degrees colder than the air outside. He reached for the light switch and the long, dank space filled with shadows. The sump pump cut out, leaving a heavy silence. One of the students from the first-floor flat had emptied the dryer and piled Marty and Nora’s load on the folding table. Marty began to sort through the tangle. Christopher set down his basket and separated whites from colors.
“I don’t mean to be a pedant,” Christopher said.
Marty turned. “I know,” he answered. “We all know that, Chris. I suppose it’s true a doctored photo could blow up on us, even after it got in the papers.”
“We’d be no different than neocon scum lying their way into a war.”
“Maybe. Maybe. But there’s also the good in getting anything up on the … on the structure there. That’ll boost up the volume, and volume’s what we need. We’re right, but nobody’s paying attention.”
Christopher sprinkled detergent over his clothes and started the machine. Then he leaned close to Marty, murmuring beneath the washer’s racket. “I have a feeling Nora’s already got something?”
“Not yet,” he murmured back. “Something tentative, one of those whistleblower things. The source is skittish.”
“Understood.” Nora was visible enough as an activist lawyer to be sought out by a graduate student, or a disgruntled technician—someone with a story to tell and a career to protect. “Any idea about the visual?” Christopher asked.
“Don’t know. The source says it’s dramatic.”
Christopher nodded, but he remained skeptical. Limiting the time to look for an image was a decent compromise, but they’d have to hold fast against delays and extensions. The ambient noise dropped abruptly as the agitator began to churn. Marty handed Christopher one end of a bedsheet. “Nora told me that your da was in touch,” he said as they shook out the wrinkles.
“’Fraid so. I’ve been summoned.”
“Anything wrong?”
They folded the sheet in half, then in half again.
“Marshall,” Christopher said. “The usual. Dad wakes up every six months and sees we’re all living parallel lives. That we’re not much of a family anymore. ‘You disappear into that goddamn commune, and I can’t pry your brother out of the basement with a crowbar.’”
“Marshall’s at home?”
“Since just before Mom died.”
“How come I didn’t remember that?” Marty set the folded sheet in his basket, then lightly fingered the edge of the gauze still taped to his head.
“When do the stitches come out?” Christopher asked.
“A couple more weeks. But I thought Marshall got rich. Some IPO or other?”
“Supposedly. Instead of working he plays the stock market out of an office he set up downstairs. He doesn’t talk numbers.”
“That TV room underneath the street level?”
“Yup. He remodeled it into a kind of in-law unit. Pretty good memory there, Martin.”
“We were over enough times, escaping our own college-days cooking. So what does Professor Kalman want his wayward activist son to do about his wayward capitalist son?”
“Show up for dinner. Not so urgent now that we’ve learned how to cook, but—oh, fuck—”
“What?”
“I just realized—they want me to come Monday. The twenty-ninth.” Christopher slumped back against the dryer. “It would have been my mom’s birthday.”
“But … that’s not so bad, right?”
“Marshall gets sentimental. It creeps me out.”
“But you’ll go?”
Christopher sighed. “Yeah, I’ll go.”
Marty began to roll socks. “Did I tell you, the other week I heard my granny is giving up her place?”
“You didn’t. Granny Flynn? The place in Connemara?”
“That’s her. Aunt Mary’ll take her in, they’ll sell the sheep. My cousin Eamon’ll keep an eye on the property while they decide what to do with it.”
“It’s been a while since you’ve been back to visit.”
“That’s what I’m gettin’ at, Chris. Time’s short, you know it as well as anybody. Go easy on your brother and your da.”
Christopher helped with a fitted sheet, then they both folded towels. “You’re right,” he said. “Only it’s easier to say so than to make it real.”
“Always will be.”
EIGHT
With an eye on the café’s wall clock, Christopher sank into a slow funk. He’d staked the afternoon on Suvali’s casual remark that she visited the Daily Grind on Fridays. Eager not to appear too eager, he’d skipped a week. Yes, he’d spied through the café’s webcam the Friday before, and decided not to draw conclusions when he failed to spot her. In person he had a wider field of view, but it gave no advantage. Suvali wasn’t there.
His schedule for Chagall’s manifesto had slipped. A tsunami of photocopies and printouts littered the café table, as if materializing Christopher’s anxiety about getting it right. A less determined propagandist might have thrown in the towel, but Christopher stayed focused on the facts. He’d been struggling to explain why splicing genes from bacteria, daffodils, and silkworms into food crops has nothing at all to do with hunger relief. He had to simplify if he wanted to counter the specious, feel-good claims of agribusiness PR hacks—especially if he meant to reach Chagall’s “staggeringly large and broad audience.”
To Christopher it was obvious that fiddling with molecules doesn’t deliver food and water to where hungry people live. But convincing readers who don’t live and breathe policy would require a careful walk through the logic. He had to explain how industrialized farming is hobbled in places that lack roads, oil, electricity, and irrigation. To describe that First World agriculture is driven by scientific prac
tice, so transgenic crops solve nothing without an on-site cadre of educated agronomists. To detail what it means to farmers when markets are disrupted by war. And all without coming off as a condescending wonk.
For readers who follow the science, it wasn’t hard to debunk agribiz PR. But think tank briefs didn’t make writing agitprop any easier. Nora was right about the worth of an image: persuasion hates complexity.
Christopher read fitfully.
The café door opened, with a metallic scrape and a burst of street noise.
Yet again, Christopher looked up.
His heart raced cartwheels up his rib cage as she took her place in line.
Christopher resisted the urge to call out as Suvali slowly advanced toward the counter, engrossed in her stale Sunday Times and every bit as lovely as he remembered.
She added milk to her tea from a steel pitcher. Stirred it in with a wooden stick. Christopher stared deliberately at his papers when she turned toward the room. He looked up slowly as she scanned for a place to sit, doing his best impression of a man surfacing from deep intellectual reflection. At the moment he caught Suvali’s eye he cocked his head, just so. Smiled. Beckoned her over to share his table.
“The place is jammed!” she said, edging into Christopher’s corner of the room. Suvali sported a yellow cashmere sweater, jeans, and the same pearl earrings she’d worn two Fridays back.
“You’re welcome to stake a claim here,” Christopher said, gathering in his things. “Last weekend’s London awaits you in perfect tranquility.”
She set down her tea and the Times, laughing. “That’s a new one. London and tranquility in the same breath. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Perfectly sure.”
Suvali made a show of noticing what he was reading. “That looks awfully sober.”
“I suppose.” World Hunger: Promise and Risk of Biotechnology topped his pile. “I warned you … politics.”
“You did. You also said this isn’t your neighborhood. I’m surprised to find you here.”
“It’s nice to find a new place,” he said sheepishly.
“But no laptop today. No mad internet chats.”
“Escaping the tyranny of the web, I guess.”
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