‘I will,’ said Francis, pulling away quietly in Hunter’s spare Tesla.
Jim’s two-hour tour of his ranch had demonstrated that homespun common sense was not just a requirement he expected from others.
‘My grandfather was acquainted with an old forester who was something of a legend up in Washington state,’ Jim had told him, as they had driven up to an area he had designated for redwood plantation. ‘He managed to make a living off the same stretch of land all his working life and he left the place with more trees on it than when he arrived. “It’s really quite simple,” he told my grandfather, “I plant more trees than I cut.”’
‘That should do it,’ said Francis.
‘Every species grows to excess,’ said Jim. ‘A blackberry bush doesn’t know when to stop growing; it just keeps on spreading. If we harvest the excess, everything is going to stay in balance.’
‘True enough,’ said Francis.
‘Folks like Hope think that conservatives want to frack the ground under our feet, dance on Nature’s grave and celebrate the rise of dictatorships, but we’re not going to work this thing out if we turn everybody into a cartoon.’
‘Maybe that’s a cartoon of how she thinks about you.’
‘Probably is,’ said Jim. ‘I have a cartoon in my head about her Tantric conferences.’
‘A lot of people have to change their minds before they can change their actions.’
‘And a lot of people seem to change their minds about how they’re going to change their minds and never get around to taking any action at all,’ said Jim, ‘and while they’re doing that, I’m having the CEO of a big oil company to stay and saying, “You need to switch from being a fossil industry to being an energy business.” He may be more inclined to listen to me than some protester chained to the company gates.’
‘He may need both,’ said Francis, ‘as you were saying about the tree-huggers and the hunters—’
‘This is the lower edge of the ranch,’ Jim interrupted him, ‘and we’ve planted five thousand redwoods that are going to extend the forest from the state park on to Titan land.’
‘That’s Apocalypse land over there, isn’t it?’ said Francis.
‘Yup.’
‘So, we could extend the forest even further along.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jim. ‘Nesting sites for more birds. We’ve had a pretty successful programme of reintroducing condors to Big Sur.’
‘Quail, wild turkey…’ Francis speculated. ‘And then you could invite some oil men over to shoot.’
‘A virtuous circle,’ said Jim, ‘as long as we don’t give them birds that are too hard to hit.’
* * *
‘In the White House reading Brainwashed!’ was the answer Olivia received when she texted Lucy to find out where she was in Hunter’s multifaceted compound. Olivia sat on the side of the bed and leant over carefully to pull on her shoes. She hadn’t been to the White House yet but had been told that it was below the main garden, a few hundred yards down the slope, embedded in a bamboo copse. Like Apocalypse Now and Plein Soleil, it was inspired by cinema; in this case, by the exquisite white hut with wide windows in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, surrounded by pale green pillars of bamboo. It was there that she and Lucy would meet, like Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, but not in their case to discuss the wilder shores of self-mastery, honour and disappointed love – at least, not as far as she knew.
As she walked down to the White House along meandering chipwood paths, Olivia felt exhilarated. She was no longer feeling sick, as she had done at the beginning, nor burdened, as she was bound to later on; the frightening tests were behind her and her energy had come back, along with the sense of being in a thrilling new relationship with a person no one else had yet met. Perhaps she would visit Karen one day with the baby. She hadn’t seen Karen for a few years, but if she dropped round with a child who was wanted and well, it might put an old sadness to rest. Or would it extend the sadness into another generation and deepen Karen’s sense of failure? Anyway, babies weren’t born to redeem or justify other people’s lives, they were born to have their own life.
* * *
Saul could hardly wait for the driverless car that would take over his repetitious journeys from Caltech to Apocalypse Now. Arrival was also less fun than it used to be, now that Hunter had cleaned up his act. Although the birdfeeder was empty, Saul still imagined it dangling brightly from the branch.
Even without a driverless car and the ultimate relief of surrendering his biological intelligence to an artificial one, the journey was now so routine that Saul felt he had achieved a semi-driverless state by burying many of his decisions in the parts of his brain that barely required him to be conscious. He had already droned north to San Luis Obispo and then peeled west and was now weaving his way along Big Sur’s legendary coast. The Madonna Inn, that Mecca of kitsch where he sometimes stopped, with its candy-pink allure and confoundingly cosy interior, lay behind him, as did the turning for Hearst Castle, which always provoked him into imagining the same scenes of disgruntled grandiosity and encroaching madness from Citizen Kane. He was well on his way to his destination, but no further along in resolving the moral conflict that agitated him constantly, like restless legs syndrome, bobbing up and down in his proleptically guilty mind.
The dagger he saw before him was one that Chrissy could see no reason for him not to plant firmly in Hunter’s back. Money had turned his nervously cheerful, basically shy, nerd of a wife into Lady Macbeth, and yet it was Hunter who had made them prosperous, some would say rich. He was paying Saul more as a consultant to Digitas than he was being paid as a tenured professor at Caltech. With Chrissy lined up for tenure in the neuroscience department, they had long shot past the half-million-dollar income that had once been their Eldorado of deferred contentment but now seemed crushingly inadequate, what with the frenzied drive to acquire a seafront property, the kids’ education, the luxurious new cars, the credit card debts, the state and federal taxes and, perhaps, above all, the corrupting exposure to the habits of the truly rich. Poverty was knocking at the door again, dressed in silk rather than cotton rags, but still insisting that there was not enough, not enough to relax when real enjoyment and security were just around the next bend.
Ah, here was the roadside viewing point that his navigation system, under normal conditions, always told him was twenty-seven minutes from the gates of Apocalypse. Yes! Twenty-seven minutes: no rockslides or traffic jams ahead. Although it was a self-inflicted pressure, Saul felt that for his own peace of mind he must attempt to reach a decision before he arrived. At the start of their collaboration, Hunter had set up a tantalising scheme that triggered a one-off, five per cent bonus for Saul when any of the start-ups he had worked on reached a valuation of one hundred million. Saul could picture a future in which packages of five-million-dollar cargo floated down now and again and landed in his bank account over the rest of his career, like supplies parachuted to the besieged Marines at the Battle of Khe Sanh. If Brainwaves took off in the way that he expected, the first package should arrive soon after the launch. In that sense, it was a terrible time to make a move for independence, but Chrissy was insisting that this was the moment to break away, now that he was finding so many promising projects; break away and put their marriage once and for all beyond the reach of insufficiency and envy. In theory, if he stuck with Hunter, he might end up with a beautiful seaside home, a few acres of garden, a boat in the harbour, an apartment in New York and three kids at Harvard. Not bad, but would there be enough for the golden retirement that he and Chrissy deserved? Was it enough and was it fair? If Happy Helmets went viral, his five million would be the kind of rip-off that would have strangers falling off stools in airport bars while he recounted again and again the story of how he had been cheated of his intellectual property by a wily businessman.
Business ideas kept flowing his way, especially since he was known to be a consultant for Digitas and a possible source of venture capital. He
was hearing exciting stuff about improved delivery systems for the health benefits of infrared light on mitochondrial cells. And John MacDonald was making some significant breakthroughs with his artificial life modelling that had all sorts of implications for quasi-biological robotics. If only he hadn’t introduced him to Hunter at Plein Soleil.
As Saul passed the entrance to the state park, the last few hundred yards of his highway journey rushed backwards in the giant screen of his Tesla X. He slipped into a trance of optimal efficiency, indicating well ahead of the turning, glancing at the screen as he slowed down, and gliding off the highway while commanding his phone to call Raoul. The ringtone thrummed through the car’s sound system as it climbed towards the first gate shared by Apocalypse, Yab-Yum and Titan, an almost immediate barrier to discourage the millions of tourists meandering along the coast from attempting to explore the segregated hilltops, or even park on the lower slopes.
‘Hello, Mr Saul, I open the gate for you.’
‘Thanks, Raoul.’
The gates were swinging open as Saul turned the corner, giving the flavour of a flow state to the end of his humdrum journey. That sense of exhilaration and the relief of arrival and the pleasure of access to an increasingly privileged setting softened Saul’s dissatisfied and combative state of mind and by the time he came to the second gate, at the foot of Apocalypse, he began to feel that it would be premature to break away from Hunter at this point in their partnership. The first relief package of five million would probably land sometime next spring, enabling him to pay off a chunk of his mortgage and other debts and putting him in a stronger position to strike out on his own at a later date. His contract came up for renewal in just under two years, when he might be able to achieve a relatively frictionless departure. Hunter had certainly mellowed since he had started going out with Lucy, but he was still a ruthless businessman and being the designated target of his legal team was a terrifying prospect. Yes, Saul decided, as he drew into the parking area beneath Hunter’s startling house, he would carry on for the moment working for Digitas, despite the pressure from Chrissy to grasp the billionaire’s crown that he truly deserved.
* * *
Bouncing down Jim’s drive and then along the track at the lower edge of Apocalypse, Francis started to feel that something really exciting could be done with the block of land formed by the three ranches. After a couple of miles, he arrived at Yab-Yum and passed under an arch made from sea-worn driftwood, polished by waves and bleached by the sun. The shadow of the totem pole rippled over the car as he started his ascent towards Hope’s formerly eponymous hilltop ranch.
The front door was opened by a lightly bearded young man, with his hair in a bun, wearing Turkish trousers and a black ear-stretcher.
‘Hi there, you must be Francis! Hope is in the pool. It’s just below the deck you can see through those doors,’ he said, pointing across the glowing wooden floor of a glass-walled, open-plan living room, scattered with stone and bronze sculptures of various deities from the crowded Hindu pantheon. Islands of sofas and armchairs and low wooden tables rested on brightly coloured rugs patterned with bears and elk and other wild animals. Hanging above the fireplace, on the only plaster wall in the room, was an unframed expanse of blue and white paint, evoking the endless contest between the protean vapours of the sea and the sky: the many-headed foam, the wind-shot or curling wave, the shape-shifting clouds and, towards the top of the canvas, a ragged cylinder of fog rolling in from the far horizon. Maybe the painting worked better on a breezy night, when the windows reflected the interior of the room and the invisible ocean murmured and boomed through an open door, but now, as Francis stepped across the threshold of the upper deck, its appeal to confusion and plasticity was guillotined by the dry precision of the view, the steep hills, the dark sparkle of the water, the cloudless sky.
When he reached the railing of the deck, he glanced down and saw Hope doing a gentle breaststroke along the outer edge of her infinity pool, naked. Francis dithered between the familiar pleasures of the landscape and the guilty pleasure of the more immediate view. At the centre of the pool’s mosaic of dark blue tiles was a swirl of orange, pink and silvery-white ceramic koi, and across its surface Hope’s slim golden body gliding slowly, her arms reaching out and her legs opening to push the water behind her. He remembered St Augustine’s famous prayer, ‘Oh, Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’, trying unsuccessfully to lift his gaze beyond the pool, towards the tumbling slopes to the placid sea. After one last moment of voyeuristic turmoil, he decided manfully to let Hope know that he had arrived, but before he could say anything she stopped swimming, dipped her head backwards in the water, smoothed her hair away from her face, and looked up at him directly, as if she had known that he was there all along.
‘Hey, Francis! Welcome to Yab-Yum. Do you want to have a swim? The water here is from the hot springs that run from Tassajara to Esalen, so it’s totally natural.’
‘I didn’t bring my bathing suit,’ said Francis lamely.
‘I’m shocked,’ said Hope, catching her breath. ‘I’ll avert my eyes.’
She laughed carelessly and arched back into the water until she was lying flat, her arms and legs spread out, as if she were on a yoga mat.
Gosh, okay, I see, thought Francis. Right.
It was not quite the ecological summit he had imagined, but then ecology was really about relationships, about seeing life not in isolated fragments but as parts of a deeply interdependent continuum and so there was, in a sense, something profoundly appropriate, as well as extremely embarrassing, about walking down to the lower deck, peeling off his clothes and wading into the sulphurous pool, in order to discuss how to get the land back to a wild and natural state.
‘Yes, it is warm,’ Francis commented, as he submerged his body hastily into the slightly steaming water.
‘Hmmm,’ said Hope, ‘it’s so relaxing. We have a tank to cool it down, otherwise it’s just too hot.’
She swam slowly but resolutely towards him, paused and looked at him fixedly before drifting closer. She reminded him of a lioness stalking through the lion-coloured grass, while he felt like the antelope that suddenly sees the grass break into a run.
‘Do you ever see mountain lions around these parts?’ he asked, grasping at the local fauna, like a man grasping at a hanging branch as a river sweeps him towards the smooth lip of a waterfall.
‘No,’ said Hope. ‘I would love to see one, but they’re so shy and elusive.’
‘Probably not that shy,’ said Francis, ‘from the point of view of a buck with a cougar hanging from its throat.’
‘I guess not,’ said Hope, stopping again about two feet away from him. ‘After the Basin Complex fire, when the deer were driven away, a lion came down from the mountains and ate quite a lot of the local pets.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I’m on the side of the wild,’ said Hope, glancing down through the narrow patch of water that now separated them.
‘Looks like you are as well,’ she added, resting a hand on Francis’s shoulder.
‘Well, “inevitable” is probably a better word than “wild”,’ said Francis, ‘to describe my body’s response to being in a warm pool with a beautiful naked woman, but sometimes physiology and morality have to be separated.’
‘Ouch,’ said Hope, ‘that sounds painful.’
‘It is,’ Francis admitted.
‘Aren’t you into polyamory?’
‘Well, if I were, it would be unilateral polyamory and there are other words for that, like “betrayal”, which rob it of some of its ideological glamour.’
‘It’s only betrayal if you’ve taken monogamous vows,’ said Hope. ‘Have you done that?’
‘Not formally, but implicitly. Anyway, why are we even talking about this? I’ve only just met you and Olivia is six months pregnant.’
‘So, you’re deeply emotionally committed to each other,’ said Hope, putting another hand on Francis’s shoulder, ‘t
hat’s beautiful and I totally respect it, but I also think you should honour your wild nature and live by what you stand for, not just in the land, but in your life and in your animal and spiritual body.’
‘Do you write a blog about this sort of thing?’ asked Francis. ‘You seem to have all the arguments lined up.’
‘Everything is lined up,’ said Hope, her breasts lightly touching his chest. She drew back politely, making him wish she hadn’t. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t feel it yesterday?’
‘I did.’
‘So, why would you not go with that?’ said Hope.
‘Whatever happened to self-mastery, ethics and the transcendence of desire?’
‘Whatever happened to spontaneity and blissful union and Yab- Yum?’ Hope replied, her hands sliding towards his neck and playing a soft chord on a set of keys Francis hadn’t known existed until then.
‘Talking of Yab-Yum,’ said Francis, in a final effort to escape the apex predator whose fingers were now intertwining around the vertebrae of his neck, ‘your ranch, I mean, rather than the symbol of ultimate union with the true nature of mind – I had a good talk with Jim on the way here. He’s planting redwoods along the lower edge of Titan. If you and Hunter agree, we could make a lovely new redwood grove.’
‘I would love a redwood plantation along the lower edge of my property,’ said Hope, hooking one leg around Francis’s hip while bending the other leg, like a dancer about to spring, ‘it would make such a rich habitat and welcome refuge for all the wildlife.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it would,’ said Francis, as he heard the creak of the branch and felt the power of the current pulling him towards the falls.
* * *
Lucy had put down her book after reading a passage scored by Olivia: ‘The anterior cingulate cortex is one of the most promiscuously excitable structures in the brain, participating in the perception of pain, emotional engagement, depression, motivation, error prediction, conflict monitoring, decision making and more.’
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