The Deluge, page 103
* * *
When Gail lost her hair during the chemo she’d said, “Now I know how you feel. No wonder men will go to any length to stop this.” Tony had started going bald when he was in his midtwenties and never put up a fight. No minoxidil or special shampoos, no combover, comb-forward, comb-anything. He watched the remaining skeins of hair retreat, the light catching more and more of the rising pink island of his lumpy skull. Now he had only a fringe of gray that rode around his dome into his beard. Still, he marveled how, for now, he looked okay. He’d been experiencing more shortness of breath and had to get up and leave a meeting with the South African delegation. The talks had dragged on into the holiday season, and the novelty of negotiating in bilateral meetings for the fate of the planet had long worn off. These things were all routinized: the same conference room with flowers in the center of a square table, a small microphone in his face, requisite glass of ice water, and the two countries’ flags hugging each other in the background before a blue curtain. His life had become a pile of briefing binders with titles like “Bhutan Drought Scenarios.” He’d been implanted with an RFID chip that tracked his movements and heart rate; Secret Service picked him up every day in an enormous SUV and he had to wear body armor on his walk inside. “From enemy of the state to one of its most prized eggs,” he told Hasan. “Package me carefully.”
They were working with Germany’s centrists to isolate Norway, Anders Breivik, and the EU countries now in the throes of a carbon-powered fascist movement. With the passage of ERASE, the stock prices of oil and gas companies had plunged, and Norway’s plan to renew its fossil sector looked as stupid as it was evil. Protests, boycotts, and occupations had broken out across Norway, Italy, France, Spain, Hungary, and Austria. Russia refused to sign on to the agreement under any circumstances; their gas was simply worth too much and the government would do whatever it could to undermine its enemies’ imperialist agenda. Similarly, India refused to sign on and would remain a problem. It had simply built so much coal-generating capacity so quickly that it had an entrenched political class subservient to the dirty energy. The increase in dangerously hot days had, by itself, spurred a boom in the installation of air-conditioning units, which had added nearly two hundred gigawatts of power to India’s grid. Though coal use had peaked in 2032, India planned to operate most of its coal-fired plants well into the second half of the century. As Tony had been saying since his book came out in 2017, the only logical solution was nuclear energy. His presentation to India focused on how it might execute a rapid buildout of its available pressurized heavy water reactors, and how this could allow for a rapid retirement of coal plants. In return for taking this pathway, the US could facilitate technology-sharing and financing for improvements to its dismal electric grid.
After the meeting with India, Ash said to him, “Nothing was mentioned of the massacres.”
Tony looked up from his cigarette. They stood in the small indoor garden of the diplomatic building where Ash always joined him when he ill-advisedly smoked. It was so unusual to hear Hasan express anything besides cold logic. He’d barely spoken of his sister in the months since August 15.
“I’m surprised to hear you’d want to bring it up,” said Tony.
“It is my ancestral homeland. My mother’s entire family has fled. The government is violent, irrational, and condones policies against Muslims that are near-genocidal. Why wouldn’t I care?”
“It’s not about caring. It’s about decoupling the issues. We don’t live in black-and-white. Never have, and certainly never will in this future. We need to hit net zero as fast as possible or everything we’re seeing is going to get much worse.”
“Every decision we make now, day by day, week by week,” said Hasan, “will be irrevocable. It would be arrogant if I didn’t express my reservations about working with such a government.”
Tony sucked on the smoke, but his lungs were too tired to enjoy it much.
“We take what looks like the moral path as often as we can. With what information we have available, as you always say. That’s all we can do.”
Ash smirked, a very strange expression for him. Tony had never seen anything like that on his face.
“I’ve come to decide morality and justice are overutilized words expressing misunderstood ideas. In the systems models we see civil breakdown, mass refugee flows, unchained barbarity waged by populations of people trying to snatch or defend scarce resources. What if we reach that tipping point in which there is nothing left to be done but truly ghastly and draconian measures? You’ve seen the CryoSat data from this summer.”
His lungs couldn’t bear it anymore. Tony dropped the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. “Bad choices and bad alternatives abound. We’re trying to save ourselves from being faced with the worst of them.”
They took two days off for Christmas, which Tony spent holding his granddaughter and thinking about tombstone dominoes. The CryoSat-2 measuring the thickness of polar ice was returning shocking numbers; modeling for the Amazon was looking extremely dire, forewarning that the lungs of the planet could be little more than a fire-scarred wasteland by 2050; the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate was finding multiple methane flares that were starting to reach the sea surface; permafrost with its 1.8 trillion tons of carbon was belching out from the Arctic in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska. The Tombstone Domino Theory of feedback loops was, as he’d been telling people for twenty years, probably initiated as soon as the world hit 365 ppm. At the current rate they were going, atmospheric carbon would not peak until 685 ppm, and even if this was the turning point and the global order reached net zero (an improbable miracle), most of the land ice on the planet would end up melting. Sea levels would rise by 230 feet eventually. Earth was on its way to four, five, or possibly six degrees of additional temperature rise. It was an endgame that would push the planet past anything a human could conceive of, and it might happen within the lifetime of his granddaughter. The last of his useless generation would die watching this down payment on chaos unspool. Holly, Catherine, and their peers would witness civilization entering its violent disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and armed conflict over water and arable land. Hannah Gail Yu’s generation would then see firsthand climatological events without precedent. Summer by summer, the planet would warm so quickly that whole nation-states and regions would incinerate in fires and dust storms while walls of water carried by unprecedented typhoons and rain bombs would wash away coasts and the world’s major cities would crumble into the sea. People would be assaulted by terrifying phenomena humanity had never before experienced. Hannah would watch these biospheric horrors rise, raze, and slaughter every few months for however long she could survive. There would be very little food production because agriculture would be next to impossible, and the food web would unravel as mass extinction wiped out species after species. She would not grow up to be president or a great ballet dancer or a neuroscientist or a VR influencer. She would be, like most of her generation, a scavenger, likely a part-time cannibal. Her life would be hard and violent. Then the generation after hers—the one that should have been populated by his great-grandchildren—would likely be the human species’ last because the surface of the planet would be too hot to sustain life.
* * *
He was back in D.C. two days later, sitting in a numbing meeting with Rathbone about Basel IV and the notion of “carbon quantitative easing” to make money out of thin air and tie it to carbon drawdown.
“What would we call it?” said some empty-suited pap from the financial sector. “A C-note? A Car-bill?”
Tony was wondering how all these dithering fools found their way into every important deliberative body, when suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Yellow tendrils fireworked in his eyes, and he gripped his chest as if he could rip out the blockage suffocating him. The last thing he remembered was slumping out of his chair onto the scratchy carpet, laying his cheek down on its fibers, and believing he was dead.
* * *
He’d barely been awake for an hour before the doctor at Sibley Memorial came in to ask if he knew that he had cancer. Later, the combination PET/MRI and PET/CT scans would reveal several large metastatic tumors in his lungs and liver, as well as the abdominal cavity. They could see a tumor like never before, while the fight against it remained primitive. A pelvic MRI, after an hour of its uneasy clanking and thrumming, found yet another tumor on his hip. This made him aware of his own body in a way he’d not wanted. Now with every step he thought of that tumor, one of many playpals, growing inside him.
“This is as serious as it gets,” the doctor told him. “Your carcinoembryonic antigen level is sky-high. That means the tumor’s proteins are—”
“I know what it means.”
“If you’d just started treatment months ago—this is the kind of aggressive cancer that…”
“It kills the shit out of you,” said Tony. “I get it.” He told the doctor he was going to go home to New Haven and would decide what to do then, but he never got in touch with the medical oncologist. It was incredible how little evolution cancer treatment had gone through in the last two decades. All the pie-in-the-sky dream treatments, all the promised advances, they’d amounted to little more than a marketing campaign. He could survive anthrax threats, a megafire, Vic Love’s private internment camp, but cancer would have his number. Chemo, he’d long ago decided, was a no go. Gail’s experience had not only obliterated her physically but it had turned them against each other as her despair and pain took her over. When she was gone, he’d felt guilt: glad as he was that it killed her so quickly. Now that it was his turn, he wasn’t going to join a Slapdish support group; he wasn’t going to revert to irrational fanaticism about various diets and herbal treatments (as Gail had briefly done) or brag about dying with grace and peace, but he would control the terms of his ultimate surrender. He was going to suffocate to death painfully and try to stay shut the fuck up about it as best he could.
He sent Hasan and the others an email tendering his resignation without explanation and departed for New Haven the next night. He had a dozen missed calls and texts by the time he touched down—from Hasan, Dahms, Rathbone, Tufariello—but he never returned any of them.
* * *
He spent the first days of the new year setting up arrangements for palliative care. He still felt relatively mobile and healthy, but he knew that would quickly degrade. As much as possible, he wanted to stay out of the hospital and in his own home. He called Catherine and told her he needed her to come to New Haven. He gave Holly a date and said he’d appreciate it if she left Dean and Hannah at home. His oldest daughter was curious, but she didn’t sound worried.
He then got a call from Marty Rathbone that he considered not answering, but this was Marty’s third try of the day, and to be fair, they had been friends and collaborators for nearly twenty years.
“Everyone wants to know why you quit, you surly fuck.”
“You can’t tell anyone until after I tell my girls,” said Tony, examining through his bedroom window the white oak that centered the yard. In the heat, it wasn’t doing too well. “I have metastatic cancer in my lungs, liver, colon, abdominal cavity, and hip. Me and Obama, right? Lucky us. So it’s not looking like I’ll actually see how all this wackiness turns out.”
Rathbone was silent on the other end of the line for a while. “Fuck me, Tone. I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t be.” And he hung up. The last thing Tony wanted was the parade of visitors, the well-wishers, the phonies who couldn’t hide in their eyes how glad they were that this hadn’t happened to them. Rathbone called him right back.
“Before you shoot it down, I’m supposed to let you know, there’s an editor from one of the big houses who wants to talk to you. This might be the right time.”
“Who? Wants to talk about what?”
“Nothing’s official yet, but I have a deal for my book already. Everyone’s cashing in on this thing. You know, there’s a woman who survived the Morris shooting and she sold her memoir for a high six figures?”
“Not interested.”
“I figured you’d say that, but can I give the guy your number anyway?”
The editor, Mel Son Park, was a good deal more convincing than Rathbone. He talked about the responsibility of creating a first draft of history and invited Tony to come hear him out over lunch.
The day he took the train in, Manhattan was clogged with protestors on their way to a rally. People carried signs and streamed down sidewalks in the frigid New York winter. They were on their way to Times Square to RALLY FOR TRUE JUSTICE, as many of their posterboards read. They had a potpourri of issues, basically most of what Tracy Aamanzaihou had wanted in ERASE that the Republicans and moderate Dems had taken out with a scalpel. Tony kept a toboggan cap low over his eyes lest anyone in the crowd should recognize him.
PenguinSchusterCollins was handily the world’s largest publisher, and Park’s choice of lunchtime venue, Manhattan’s brand-new Robin Room, reflected that market share, with menu prices that would make a Russian oligarch blanch. Tony was taking the meeting because he could admit to himself writing a memoir had always intrigued him. He thought for sure he’d get around to it after One Last Chance debuted and the buzz of mainstream attention burned bright. That book had been a polemic, though, not a reflection on his life. He did yearn to tell his story. He suspected most everyone felt this way. In the face of the impossible eternity that awaited, people wanted to take their futile shots at being remembered.
“What has just occurred,” said Park, a perfectly groomed, exquisitely dressed man in a pair of high-end AR glasses, “could end up being one of the most consequential turning points in American—and global—history, and I’ve taken it upon myself to go out and find as many first-person accounts of that moment as I can. The public is voracious for books about the climate crisis.” He had black hair sweeping back stylishly, a Patek Philippe platinum solar watch on his wrist, and a meticulous, powerful way of massaging the air with his hands as he explained himself.
“We don’t know how long anything lasts in publishing, but you’ve been a central figure of this fight for at least two decades. You have the insider’s account of the climate bill—what did you call yourselves? The committee to unfuck the world?—not to mention your detention during the Love administration.”
“Just wait till you hear about going to rescue my daughter in the middle of the LA megafire.”
Park’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m demanding you tell me that story right now.”
By the time he finished, lunch had come and gone, and Park sat back with his arms crossed.
“Tony, to say nothing of the VR option that will inevitably come from this, I can say right now, we’ll offer you at least a million dollars for this book.”
“It’s not the money that’s holding me back, trust me.”
He explained his diagnosis, and he was grateful that Park was transparently looking for a way around it. Even as Tony explained the severity, Park did not offer so much as a sympathetic tilt of his head let alone a bromide about how sorry he was. He nodded and stared at a waiter’s flawless white shirt as the man perched over the table next to them to deliver lunchtime mimosas to a couple of rich ladies.
“We could probably go as high as one-point-five,” he said.
“Mr. Park, it’s not the money. Believe me, one of my daughters—I’m glad the money’s going to be there for her—but it’s the time I have left. I’ve never been a quick writer.”
“All we need is for you to meet with a ghostwriter,” he said. “They’ll craft the book. You just tell your stories.”
“Ah, right. I see.”
“Does that not work?”
Tony hugged his arms, felt his tumor-invaded abdomen rise and fall. “It worries me that might be how my grandchildren will know me. Through the lens of this person I’ve only just met.”
Park stared at him strangely. Even though they’d just eaten, Park looked hungry. Ravenous even.
“There’s another option. Something new,” he said. “I’m wondering if you’d be willing to give it a try.”
* * *
On February 3, Holly, Catherine, and Corey all arrived in New Haven. Corey had been a last-second invite, not because Tony wanted him there but because it would save him from having to do this again with his brother-in-law. Corey had plans to launch the stalled family business in a new direction. His goal: save and reinvent Miami. Having found the Lord on the issue of sea level rise, he wanted to turn the city from a doomed Atlantis into an impermeable floating citadel—the first of many cities to hybridize land and water, which all sounded like bad science fiction to Tony. When Corey began to grate on him, he tried to remind himself what Gail would’ve wanted and to recall seeing Corey through the smoke of Los Angeles, having run into the flames to bring in the cavalry and deliver him and Catherine to safety.
The four of them cooked and ate dinner together. Tony handmade the pasta, Holly and Catherine packed and seasoned the meatballs, and Corey opened bottle after bottle of wine. (Tony wondered if he normally drank this much around Catherine.) He could almost forget the reason he’d brought them all together. During dinner Holly projected holograms of Hannah from her phone. Dean had a pet turtle and Hannah could not get enough of it, pointing to it every time he set it on the carpet to crawl past her: “Toytle!”
Corey was about to go to the kitchen to open yet more wine when Tony asked him to stay put. “There’s obviously a reason I wanted all three of you up here.” He looked at Holly, then Catherine. “I’m joining your mother shortly. I have stage IV. It started out in the colon, but now it’s everywhere.”
He found himself talking in too much detail about the diagnosis and staring at the carpet instead of looking them in the eyes, but then Catherine cut him off, whispering first to herself, then louder and louder, “No, no, no, no, no, no! NO!”
