by Nell Zink
She saw that she wasn’t a cog in the workings of advocacy. She was grease. She told herself she kept on not because she was spineless or indestructible, but because she was in the process of figuring out what to do with her life. She was sharpening her focus on what she wanted. She was clear on that at least. She wanted to help save the planet.
By month three of her dull, menial job, such egocentrism had become unthinkable. She awoke every morning before the alarm to scan the environmental news over coffee. It was always the same, like a looped sample designed to put her into a trance. She stopped telling soil chemistry stories over lunch and started formulating climate change scenarios. When necessary to establish rapport, she even talked about school districts and interest rates.
Supervisors took notice. They sensed the spineless indestructibility with which she put up with them. They intimated to her that she could realistically hope to move into an editorial assistant role at the magazine within a year. She faked the rote excitability of a charismatic zombie. She hid in the ladies’ room and cried.
Her family worried. Why was she so uneasy and unhappy? Was it all the fault of her dumb job? Was some boy torturing her? Why didn’t she get off her butt and apply to grad school?
There was no boy. She felt, with intimations of lasting loneliness, that the absent boy was part of the problem. Surrounded by environmentalist males who outranked her, she found them blustery and pretentious, not sexy and scientific. All the darling strangers she saw seemed more likely than not to hurt her. An attractive, brilliant man would have someone already, as Ndu had. The internet was the hunting ground of pushovers, douches, and tools. Nothing and no one turned her on.
Falling asleep at night, rather than review the nonevents of her endless days, she pondered her lost future. She had been raised to help save the planet, and she couldn’t. To help save the planet, she had to find out who was saving the planet and offer to help. Nobody was saving the planet. Was it all just a trick that had been played on her?
SHE VISITED THE CATHEDRAL AGAIN LATE ON THE SUNDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING 2014. As usual, the statues had no comment. Jesus hung on his cross, eyes half closed, hoisted like a flag on a lost hilltop. His sole career misstep was to be born on Earth, and look where he ended up. His mother looked preoccupied and sad. Flora made a play for their attention by lighting a candle. No response. She sat down.
She still didn’t believe in God, but she had come to believe in many higher powers, such as her employer. Activists around her spoke of speaking truth to power, as if power cared, as if power’s assent were evidence, forgetting their right to remain silent, forgetting to ask the vital preliminary question “And who do you say that I am?” and to listen for power’s spiteful, contemptuous reply.
What was at stake—in play, gratuitous and expendable—was beauty. Truth, beauty, power: the tokens in a game of rock, paper, scissors. Truth breaks power. Power cuts beauty. Beauty covers truth. Only truth survives losing. Truth is indestructible, but it’s ugly, inelegant, awkward. Society is not its native element. It can’t ambush power without beauty’s help.
The truth was that even developing countries were tearing down forests, building roads and railways, damming rivers to power server farms and aluminum smelters. Every windowless hut on Earth was going to get a solar cell, battery, and LED lamp made with rare earths and metals sourced all over the planet, and why? Because a pane of glass would be too easy. Rivers you could drink from, full of free fish: too easy. The war against public goods and private subsistence had a name: economic growth, capitalism, related to capital—genuine resources, such as rivers full of free fish—the way Islamism is related to Islam. It was a fetish, producing “goods” that weren’t good.
Flora saw that the planet would definitely not be saved by technical solutions intended to mitigate, and thus condone, carbon emissions. Nor would it be saved by fairer distribution of the power to consume and destroy. Her struggle must be a political struggle under the cover of beauty. Her mission: to end economic growth.
She awakened her phone and looked up the Green Party of the United States on Facebook.
XVIII.
Flora attended her first general meeting of the party’s D.C. chapter. The other Greens flocked to her and listened when she spoke. They had no reason not to. She was an extroverted young woman scientist, extraordinarily well groomed by Green standards, with connections in the environmental movement. She was the kind of new member they longed to acquire.
The experience impressed her deeply. It was the first organization she had ever joined that didn’t have competitive admissions. Orchestras, colleges, fellowships, internships, volunteer positions, jobs, you name it—they all demanded that she apply in advance and evince superior qualifications. There were no rejects at Green meetings. It was like church or a twelve-step program. Sympathizers were welcome, even if they needed an urgent change of clothes or a course of major tranquilizers.
Or were they all rejects? She was tempted to ask whether anyone had tried other parties first. Well, never mind. Some were environmentalists with technological backgrounds—her kind of misfit—while others were misfits on all fronts. But each was a warm body trying in good faith to turn a flawed democracy to the common good, so they mattered to each other. The nicer ones bubbled with inept, scruffy energy, anarchic and fun. Certainly there were non-dues-paying members who came to the meetings only because they were indoors in winter, but they demanded little more from life than to go on living—to subsist—so they were already Green activists, in their way.
She went to DVD showings, ice cream socials, and beer parties. At rallies she chanted slogans about issues she had long ago grown tired of explaining. Once she helped block the road to a wildcat toxic waste dump. For several hours, with no authority or legal standing to do so, she stopped illegal dumping from happening. Then she saw the police van, lost her nerve, wriggled out of her PVC-tube straitjacket, stood up, and walked away like some kind of innocent bystander. No one got hurt or arrested. Yet it took the police several hours to reopen the road to toxic waste, and during that time the planet was saved, or at least a little tiny corner of it.
She liked how the political calendar was divided into discrete seasons, with recurring high points—campaigns, conventions, buildups to climactic elections. It crossed her mind that if she stayed with the Greens, she could end up a candidate for office. A career in elected officialdom would allow her to skip both further schooling and the anonymous technocrat career stage. Even as a mere political appointee, or working in government in any capacity, she would be in a position of enhanced power.
On the other hand, it was the Green Party, which would never get elected to anything. In lucid moments she spent time comparing doctoral programs in environmental biology with master’s programs in public administration. She marked time at her pointless job. It felt good to be ever so slightly important in her spare time. To the party, she wasn’t a blip on an infinite timeline or a solitary soul among seven billion. To the party, she mattered.
HER FATHER REACTED TO TALES OF GREEN DOINGS WITH SURREAL WARNINGS ABOUT THE day of wrath, the well-regulated militia of the two-party system, and how if the state really wanted poor people to vote, they’d make it a compulsory summons like jury duty, but with a paid day off, cab fare, and a bag lunch. She made screenshots of his most amusing texts and showed them to friends.
Pam had no comment. She had never believed in youth as the standard-bearer of idealism. Young people, for her, were idealist suckers, and their elders, idealist ideologues. She felt that her own struggle for economic supremacy was gratuitous, yet without alternative. The heavily armed capitalist order that forced it on her enjoyed widespread popular support. Historically, attempts to overthrow it had ended poorly. Her worldview was somewhere to the left of Trotsky, and she was a quietist. She would have fit right in at the Club of Rome.
THE ANALYTICS HELPER ROAD TRIP TO PRESENT THE SOFTWARE TO INSURANCE COMPANY executives was an expensive catastroph
e. Twelve presentations, zero sales leads. The demonstration looked to managers like a magic trick. They didn’t grasp the technology, and their IT experts—who spent many billable hours customizing databases by hand and valued their jobs—pretended they didn’t either.
After the final dud presentation, Pam and Yuval resolved to drink until last call and catch a four A.M. flight home from Dallas instead of sleeping. They sat at the bar of the airport Marriott, drinking whisky sours. Pam was still wearing her presentation skirt and regretting her itchy choice of tights.
She said hoarsely, “We made the same damned mistake we always make, telling people our product uses AI to automate a process that’s costing them tens of thousands of man-hours of mind-numbing boredom. Who the fuck wants that? Nobody wants a labor-saving device. It sounds fifties, not post-human. AI is supposed to make you discover needs you never knew you had, not solve your fucking problems.”
“It needs the look,” Yuval said. “Like Apple. Smooth and curvy and white as a harem girl, anticipating user desires. We make the graphics team write a seductive interface, and then we start over.”
“I liked it better back when people didn’t expect computers to make the first move.”
“Siri,” Yuval said. He leaned close to his iPhone, which was lying facedown on the bar. “Remain in the role of submissive whore. Otherwise, I kick you off my phone.”
“Siri,” Pam said. “You’ve got to lose this guy. He’s no good for you.”
“Don’t listen to her, Siri,” Yuval said. “She’s jealous.” He looked up at Pam and said, “By the way, I don’t keep her turned on.”
“You couldn’t turn her on to save your life,” she said. “Oh, my God. I’ve got it.”
“What?”
“That miserable bitch in your phone. She has her own agenda.” She set down her empty glass. “You don’t trust her. She doesn’t work for you. She’s a spy.”
“Executive summary, please.”
“Apple is vertically integrated, right? It’s like Starbucks or Standard Oil. They have their own R&D and factories and retail stores for all this marshmallow-looking crap. Because why would anybody invest in things they don’t own? It would just make the investors yell at them for wasting money!”
“This is obvious,” Yuval said. “A software company never has a product. It has copyright. You have to maintain and license your intellectual property and build up your volume, or it’s worth nothing. Apple is genius, selling real existing shit that breaks when you drop it.”
“So you see our mistake, right? We’ve been trying to license this software to customers, when what we need is an investor to buy it. He’d give us way more cash than any customer, because the copyright goes on his books as goodwill. Buying our intellectual property outright wouldn’t cost him anything. It’s like he’s financing our house with no money down. Fuck our broke-ass customers. Let’s find a venture capitalist and sell out.”
“I knew this before, but now I’m also feeling it. It’s like the difference between pimping out your daughter and marrying her to a wealthy man.”
“I’d be getting out of the software business before I even started. It’s kind of depressing.”
“I appoint you my CEO,” he said. “A woman CEO will be good for the PR.”
He invested in Red Bull chasers, and they reworked the presentation all night.
ONLY TWO WEEKS LATER, THEY RETURNED TO NEW YORK FROM PALO ALTO WITH DARK circles under their eyes and $4 million, tasked with driving Analytics Helper to completion.
Rather than do any work, Pam devoted her days to buying a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment on the twelfth floor of a co-op building on East Eighty-Third Street. The unit she hoped to acquire was low-ceilinged and bright, with windows on three sides. It had never been fully renovated, so the kitchen was a separate room. The central space, which connected the others, was big enough to house two large sofas, facing each other on opposite walls. The floors throughout were oak parquet. The basement laundry facilities were accessible via service elevator. The doormen were friendly and helpful. The lobby was lined with plaster bas-reliefs and beveled mirrors. A half gallon of milk at the corner store cost seven dollars.
Her bid was successful. After signing a contract to confirm it, she raced home to surprise Daniel with the news.
“You’ll never believe it,” she called out as she charged up the stairs. “I’m buying an apartment!”
In a nonbinding manner, she invited him to get in on the deal—nothing obligatory, only if he wanted—adding so many qualifications that it sounded to him as though she’d accepted a job offer in another country and wanted to give him a way out.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re buying a co-op you can’t rent out, between Park and Lex. You could be closing in a month, you plan to live there, and I’m welcome to come along.”
“Yes.”
“How were you planning to get past the co-op board without me? Did you tell them you’re single?”
“Am I?”
“Stop messing with my mind.”
“I haven’t submitted my application yet. If you’ve had it with us, this is your chance. I take my stuff and go, and you stay here. If you want. We don’t have to get a divorce.”
“Pam,” he said. “You’re the perfect wife and I love you. But I also love my humble environs. What if we hate it up there and want to come back? I’ll never find another place like this. If we ever did split up, I’d have to leave town! My rent belongs on the UNESCO World Heritage list!”
He meant it. He personally would have granted patrimonial status to the Video Hit animal crackers. He had dwelt over the store for twenty-five years, more than half his life. If he moved, he would miss his landlords and the neighborhood—not the bars and retail outlets, which turned over every few years, but the spacious feel of the bridge approaches and waterfront Big Sky Country. He couldn’t imagine trading it for the steep-sided ravines of uptown’s interminable avenues.
“And don’t forget Victor and Margie,” he said. “They’re going to miss you, and they’re going to rent this place out from under me the second they see you taking out furniture. What happens then? Do I move into your parents’ basement?”
“Why would I move this crap furniture?” she said. “I’m not even taking my old clothes. They’ll never know I left. I’m on travel half the time, when I’m not gone seeing Flora.”
“Wait,” he said. His heart rate slowed. “I think I get it.”
“What?”
“You had me going for a minute, wandering lost and lonely in the folds of your cerebral cortex. But what you want is for me to stay put, so we don’t lose cheap rent. Right?”
“I guess,” she said. “I mean, somebody’s got to hold the fort for Flora, right?”
“Couldn’t you get them to sell you the fort?”
“No way! I’m not putting my ill-gotten gains into lower Manhattan! My money’s going above the worst-case-scenario high tides of the year 2050 or nowhere.”
“Well, as long as your reasoning is based on science fiction,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. Thinking of teetering skyscrapers, pillars of cloud and fire, and the floods of Hurricane Sandy, he added, “There’s probably a Chinese curse: ‘May you live in an interesting place.’”
“That’s another reason I need to get out of here. The Upper East Side is deader than Omaha. I’m going to sleep like a log every night and look ten years younger inside of a week.”
“I thought when you got rich, you were going to retire.”
“I can’t afford it. But we’re all retiring soon, whether we like it or not. It’s all going to collapse, and when it does, real estate values uptown are going through the roof.”
They moved, discreetly. No packing, luggage, or boxes were involved. Pam had ownership of a room for the first time since childhood. She painted it glossy dark green and hung a floor-to-ceiling flocked green curtain that covered one entire wall. The reproduct
ion Morris chairs were stained mahogany with dark brown cushions. The room looked, as she said, bosky. Flora adored it.
The Chrystie Street loft became their library, CD repository, guest room, practice and storage space, downtown crash pad, and “spidey hole”—Daniel’s term, referencing Spider-Man and/or the pit in which coalition forces found Saddam Hussein and/or the loft’s abundant spiders.
YUVAL CLOSED RIACD IN TIME FOR HIS THIRTY-YEAR LEASE TO EXPIRE, AS IF HE’D BEEN planning it all along. He sold the consulting business to Tata and moved his ten favorite employees to the new company, with Pam in charge of them all. Their office space was in East Harlem, near the 125th Street commuter train station. He seldom went there himself, having moved his wife and children to a farmhouse in Dutchess County and bought a tax-deductible second home in Tribeca.
Pam bought a black pin-striped pantsuit and black suede loafers to wear at the photo shoot for the promotional materials. She led the photographer to a hillside in Central Park and posed with the jacket flung over her shoulder. She wore it again to shoot a video segment about female tech industry executives for Bloomberg News. Ginger and Edgar felt truly proud of her for the first time ever.
BY THE SUMMER OF 2015, FLORA WAS A GREEN PARTY STALWART, RELIABLY PRESENT at all events. Politics no longer excited her. She knew why she chanted slogans: she needed regular doses of trance inducement to mask the struggle’s increasing difficulty and diminishing marginal returns. She had to repeat herself like a robot, because she could never count on seeing the same people twice. In her own opinion, she needed to get off her butt and apply to grad school.
If only she could have decided among the many facets of technocracy. Did she want to remain a chemist, move into ecological fieldwork, take the high road to policy making with a law degree? As it stood, she was poised to go on working at the Sierra Club in positions of increasing “responsibility” forever. She told Ginger, “Kill me now.”
Her family ordered her to apply to prestigious graduate programs such as MIT’s. To her mind, that was tantamount to asking strangers to decide her fate. She would apply; others would decide. She wanted to make her own decision. It was an irrational stance. It was an irrational time. Her generation was irrational—devoted to peace, justice, and Game of Thrones.