Our foolish optimism.
Anyway, he’d built his new house into the side of the hill, and I had no idea how he did that. I guess he paid a lot of people, because even living out in the deep, he was still sick. Not a strong man.
Like he said, if he needed more room, well, he just dug deeper into his hill. He showed me how there was a system of fans to move the air about in the furthest rooms.
‘Gets a bit stale otherwise,’ he said, and when I started wondering about power he told me how the whole place was on DC, like Detlef’s getup, and how all the power came from a hundred million miles away, by which he meant the sun. And on the hill above the house there was a stack of solar panels made to my own design, I might add, because they were better than the ones you could buy.
And if you think living in a cave was unpleasant, well, you’d be wrong. You might think different, but what I meant was, a cave was not unpleasant, not if John Polleux had made it. It was cool in the summer and it was easy to warm in the winter. It was quiet, and he had everything you could want in there. And he had rooms for this and rooms for that and some were for being practical like a room full of the batteries for the solar panels and others were for being beautiful like the library, his one room full of books. The shelves were made of beautiful dark wood, and there were little lamps here and there so it felt real cozy, and the floor was covered in fancy rugs, dark red and black, and it had a big leather armchair with a little table next to it where you set your bourbon while you read and thought about the finer things in life.
Then there were the labs. Three of ’em. Big dark places lit by little bright spotlights where he did his science. Full of stuff that was who knew what? To do whatever new kind of science he was doing. To start with, I didn’t go in there. He just showed ’em to me and that was that, and when I said what are you working on, he smiled and said this and that, this and that.
Now, I had no idea what this old guy wanted with me in his house, and if you’re thinking, oh Ash, you were such a naïve little snowflake, then let me tell you, it weren’t anything like that. He was a gentleman, John Polleux. And we spoke about all sorts of odd things. Things like Voltaire and his book. He even gave me a copy to read and I started it though I didn’t get much further than the first few pages. Or things like this: one day, as I filled a jug with water for us to have at lunch, I said, ‘Huh, you have your own well I guess.’
Now, Mona had a well too, that was where her water came from, but Polleux said how it was a mite harder to get a well dug out here, because he was higher up and the water table was lower down underground.
‘But it’s amazing,’ I said. ‘You have the sun for power and you have your own water. You don’t need nothing from no one.’
Now we had been getting ready to eat and Polleux was fussing in the kitchen like he always fussed when he had to do something hard, such as cook. But when I said that last part he stopped right then and there and he said to me this:
‘Well, first of all, I might need some food once in a while. And I do not grow my own food. I considered it, but it would take too much of my time and too much of my energy and I need those two things for other matters. Other matters which are more pressing. You understand?’
And I nodded, quick, because boy was he being serious all of a sudden.
‘And second of all, the sunshine is not mine. Even though I harness it. And the water is, for sure, also not mine.’
‘But it’s on your land.’
‘My land?’ he said. ‘My land. What a curious expression that is! Shall we talk about bacteria again?’ and I could kinda see what he meant and I was kinda confused as heck too.
‘The water table under our feet in this place known as Arizona spreads from New Mexico in the east to California in the west. It is estimated that in the last century it has lost maybe 150 cubic kilometers in volume.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh. Where’d the water go?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘People?’ I said. ‘Farming? Towns, cities? Watering the cemetery?’
‘That’s the general idea. People. And … ?’
‘Money?’
‘Money,’ he said and snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it. I see Mona Mochsky has taught you well. People don’t stop to think whether something is a good idea, as long as there’s money to be made.’
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘You hear about that guy wants to build a new smart city in the desert, west of Phoenix?’
‘I did indeed. In a place where the water is running out.’
Then we sat down and we started to eat and it was the usual thing he made which was eggs, and while we ate he told me about water. He told me about how it was running out, and fast. Because of the demand for it. And how the world warming up was only gonna make that worse. And even in places where there was water, he told me about places like Glendive, Montana, where a company called Bridger Pipeline spilled 30,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River and how the benzene had gotten into the drinking water and was making people sick, and about how two companies called Saint-Gobain and Honeywell had polluted the Hoosic River in upstate New York and how the local people were getting cancer and other stuff and dying, and about how the United Nuclear Corporation let 1,000 tons of radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of acidic radioactive effluent into the Puerco River at Church Rock, New Mexico. Just about a hundred and fifty miles from where we set that lunchtime. Eating eggs. And how that radioactive waste, on top of all the other uranium mines thereabouts, caused sickness and disease and death in the Navajo, but how the scientists and the government told ’em it was because of a genetic tendency and nothing to do with the radioactive shit they was drinking and washing in.
‘So, you tell me, Ash. Whose water is it?’
And I had no answer to that one. Save it was everyone’s. Or no one’s. Probably no one’s.
‘Do you know what a zanjero is?’ he asked, and so for about the hundredth time since I’d met Polleux I had to say ‘no, I do not’ and feel dumb.
‘A dying art. Perhaps a lost one. This part of the world has been dry for a long time. They used irrigation canals in days gone by, to make the land fertile and bring water to where it needed to be. And it was a fine art, and it took clever men to control the flow of water across the land, to care for those canals. They were called zanjeros. And it wasn’t just the men. Being a zanjero was a family business. The husbands rode horses, caring for the water, and the wives stayed home to take orders for deliveries, to do the bookkeeping, fix problems, and so on.’
‘Zanjero, huh?’
‘Spanish for ditch rider. First they rode their horses. Then they rode their trucks. And they cared for the water. They even cared for people. They were sworn in as peacekeepers and would settle disputes between neighbors. It was a real important job. But those days are gone.’
He went and fished around and came back with a magazine. A real old magazine. It had the date 1902 on the front and it was called Century. He flicked through it and showed me an article he’d found about the zanjero. I remember it still. Word for word. Polleux read it out to me, like it was poetry.
‘“The zanjero. He is the yea and nay of the arid land, the arbiter of fate, the dispenser of good and evil, to be blessed by turns and cursed by turns, and to receive both with the utter unconcern of a small god.”’
Then he laughed and I didn’t see anything so funny to be laughing at and he said that he’d read a few books over the years, storybooks about the end of the world and a few that was about the world flooding. I’d read one or two like that myself.
‘Foolish books,’ he said.
But then he said maybe that was unfair. Because they was kinda right and kinda wrong, because yep, the seas will rise, but long before that, finding anything fit to drink on the dry land is gonna be a real big problem.
‘Once upon a time I thought I ought to be one of those rare scientists who write a novel. Mona would approve, I think. It would have
been about the abnormally drying world, and it would have been written to amuse a small number of men of wit. It would have been the start of a whole new genre. Xerotic fiction!’ he said and laughed at himself, and I laughed too but I didn’t get the joke until I looked it up in a dictionary in the library later on that night. Then I had a real good old chuckle to myself. (I’m funning you about that last part. It just turns out xeros is Greek for ‘dry.’)
Polleux had gone to bed. He always went to bed early and woke early, while I was the other way around. He’d made up a storeroom for me to sleep in and it was just fine. It was better than a porch, or a shed, or even a cabin. I lay there thinking things. I admitted something to myself that I had been thinking for a while: that I would have to sell my house. Jenny’s place. It might have cost me a dollar to buy it but there was more to a house than just that. You had to pay for the electricity and there was taxes to be considered and all I had been earning was the few dollars Mona gave me for driving people’s groceries around the desert. In a truck I no longer had. And then I thought that if I sold the house the money shouldn’t be mine and I oughta give it to Steve and if he didn’t want it I oughta give it to charity. And I thought maybe there was a charity that gives help to folks with MCS because the government sure weren’t doing nothing to help those folks, folks like that, who’d gotten sick through no fault of their own and didn’t have the insurance to pay for it. Because they couldn’t afford insurance in the first place. Because of the way the damn government had it all set up with the gods of the land of Pharma.
And I thought about what Polleux had said about writing his xerotic novel and all. I asked him why he didn’t do it and he said because he had more important things to do. And then I wondered what those things were, but it wasn’t long before I found out, and that’s when things got truly weird.
Y
Yes, there is a thing
called science and it can
give you answers
So at first of course I figured that Polleux was trying to figure out how to cure people of MCS and electrical sensitivity. That that was what he was up to in those three dark labs of his. But I soon found out that he’d given up on that one long ago.
‘I get by,’ he said. ‘Just like you. And the canaries. Now I live out here, in this safe place, I’m ok. Of course, it means I’m not fit to go back to flatland, but I suppose that flatland is overrated anyway.’
I think he was funning about that one. Maybe.
‘And anyway, if I found a cure of some kind for MCS, well that would just mean I’d found a way to make people cope with living with things that are bad for them, that are toxic, and so on and so on. And what is the point of that? None. In my opinion. Instead, we have to find a way to stop these things happening in the first place.’
And when I said, ‘What things?’ he said, ‘Why, Ash, the bad of the world.’ And when I asked what he meant by that, he said, and this time I heard him for sure when he said, ‘Ash, it’s time to tend the garden’ and then he kinda clammed right up.
We were sitting in one of his labs one day and it was the one with the mice. Now the mice were cute and there were a lot of ’em and they were in cages and some were running around in little maze-like things and some were in pairs and some were alone and he said it was all part of his plan and you won’t be surprised if I tell you I started to wonder if all was right with what was inside Polleux’s head right then. But he was an easy man to underestimate, that John Polleux. Sure he looked old and frail and a bit sick when he’d been to town, but he was not a man to underestimate.
The mice were running around the mazes on the big tabletops of the lab, or they set nibbling or standing up sniffing the air, and I felt a bit sorry for them, because they sure were cute. Then I thought, why do I only feel sorry for ’em because they’re cute? What if they was ugly critters? Shouldn’t I feel the same if they was ugly?
And Polleux had just told me how he didn’t want to cure MCS.
‘Not anymore,’ he said.
‘But you did once?’
‘Sure I did. Who wouldn’t? To be sick with a long-term illness is not something most people understand. Not until it happens to them. And when it does, it changes the way you see life. Do you not agree?’
And I said, yes, I did agree, and I told him how Mona had told me I would learn to be someone else.
I thought about something Detlef had said to me one day, way back, about how, before you get sick, you just don’t have your eyes open. And once you do, once you realize how fragile we are, then everything looks different. You start thinking crazy things, like how, if you stopped breathing for just thirty seconds or a minute you’d be dead, but you never think about it. Not until you get sensitive, which is to say, not until you get sick. And then everything becomes super precious. Even something as simple as a sunrise and a hummingbird. Even a dumb goat. Even a faded red T-shirt.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘But that’s not to say that you don’t want to get better. Desperately. So for a while, I tried to figure it out, but I admit it was beyond me. You know what they say about MCS? How does it go? At first you’re afraid you’ll die. Then you’re afraid you won’t. Right?’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
‘Well, finally, something else happens. Finally, you’re not afraid at all.’ He smiled at me. ‘If you get that far …’
And then I knew he was thinking about Bly and I said that thing that Mona said that Dostoyevsky, 1821 to 1881, said about a man being a creature who can get used to anything.
‘Sadly, this is not always true,’ Polleux said. ‘You know, one night, when I was first ill, I mean a year or two into it, and still with no idea why, I went to bed every night and hoped not to wake up in the morning. Every night it was the same, but then, one night, I wondered about God.’
‘Him?’ I said.
Polleux laughed.
‘Or Her. Anyway, you should know I am a scientist. I have been a confirmed atheist as soon as I got to the age of nine and could see that belief in supernatural beings is no less stupid than belief in the tooth fairy. And yet, that one night, I was so desperate, so desperate, so I tried looking out into the dark to see if God was there and if He would help. And I prayed and you know, I felt something come into me. I cannot explain what, but I felt relief, comfort, and that night I knew that God was going to make me better.’
‘And did He? Or She?’
‘He or She did not. By the time I woke up the following morning that momentary feeling of relief had gone. And I was still as sick as a dog and I knew that the only answers would come from the reason of mankind. From science. But I saw for one hour of my life how powerful it is to have faith in some great being looking after you.’
‘So you still don’t believe in God?’
Polleux waved at the mice.
‘Do these fellows believe in God? Am I their god? I can decide if they live or die, what happens to them. But do they know I exist?’
‘Uh,’ I said. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘My point is that I could just about believe in an Old Testament kind of god. The one who punishes wickedness and sends you to hell if you’re bad. But who’ll protect you if you do what he wants. That all makes sense. Horrible sense, but it makes sense. But a New Testament kind of god? Jesus and Mary and so on? No. An all-loving, all-powerful God is a contradiction in terms.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, for example. You recall we spoke about Voltaire’s Candide?’
I did. We had talked about it a lot in my first days with Polleux, since it was what had brought me there.
‘You recall the episode with the Lisbon earthquake? Voltaire put that real-life event in the book for a very good reason. It shook people’s faith greatly. That if there was a God, and of course almost no one doubted it in those days, that He could let such a thing happen. Or even cause it. And what made it worse was that it happened on November the first. All Soul’s Day. A holy day, when more people than usual were
in the city and were attending masses. Many people were crushed inside the collapsing churches. Now, Ash, I can understand an Old-Testament-you-sinned-and-so-I’ll-send-a-flood kind of god doing that. But not an all-loving, all-powerful one.’
‘Huh,’ I said. Which was more or less the smartest thing I said that day.
So Polleux, he said he would pay me to be his assistant. And I said, yeah, but I ain’t staying long, and he said, well, that’s ok. Maybe I could come out and see him sometimes. He said that mostly he would need help playing with mice. Even if I didn’t know what they were doing, it was fine by me. And those mice, they sure were cute, and they sure were ignorant of their god.
A few days later, Polleux went to town to get his supplies, and so I went for the ride and he dropped me off at Mona’s.
We rode out, like zanjeros across the xerotic landscape, and we passed Bly’s burned-out truck.
‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘Would you look at that?’
It was a black and burned-out lump of metal and looked like hell.
‘We’ll have to get it towed,’ Polleux said, as he drove off the track and around it. But we never did. It sat there, and I’m guessing it still sits there.
Mona was getting along okay.
It was great to see her and I gave her a big hug and she said don’t squash me, I’m only little. And she said are you okay and I told her about the mice and the truck and all.
‘How’s things?’ I said and she didn’t say anything much. She kinda smiled but I could see her heart wasn’t in it.
‘You okay?’ I said again and she nodded and said maybe she could make some tea and then I said, ‘Where’s Cooper at?’ and then Mona said, ‘Oh, Ash’ and she started crying so then I knew Cooper was gone.
She wiped herself up and said, ‘He did good. He did real good. He was one old mutt. But now it’s just me and the goat.’
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