The Deluge, page 44
“How’d the meeting go?” his brother-in-law, Corey, asked him when they met for a late lunch before his flight home.
“Oh, dandy,” said Tony. He insisted they sit inside the restaurant so he could avoid sweating like a hog in the Florida heat. Their table overlooked Biscayne Bay, boats puttering around the water, traffic flowing idly over the bridge to Miami Beach. Clear blue sky.
“This place is great,” said Corey. “How are my nieces doing?”
“Holly’s great. She’s taking over the New York office of FBF. Dean’s teaching at the New School.”
“A rabble-rouser like her dad. And Cat? Still holding out hope for her big break?”
“Guess so.” Although he really had no idea. Even after Tony acquiesced to her dream of acting, Catherine forbade him from inquiring about her progress, claiming it put too much pressure on her. The waiter brought Tony’s iced tea and Corey’s wine spritzer.
“That’s terrific.” He quaffed the spritzer. “How ’bout you? Seeing anyone?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Tony, come on, man! You can’t just wank it in the VR set the rest of your days.”
“God. Corey.”
“Just saying. Check out this one I’m dating now.” He held his phone aloft. A picture of him in a glossy blue suit with his arm around an uninspiring bleach blonde with a spray tan and enormous fake breasts.
“Wonderful,” said Tony. He gazed dispiritedly around the restaurant. Mostly wealthy retirees adorned in every manner of sparkling mineral washed of the toxic slurry its extraction had left behind in some far-flung sacrifice zone. All of them albatrossed by credit cards, boat upkeep, and the perturbations of the stock market.
“I know, right?” Missing the irony in Tony’s comment, Corey flipped through several more pictures of his latest conquest. Corey had married his college girlfriend, a woman both Tony and Gail had quite liked, only to divorce her when he started really making money in their father’s business. The Briggs Group of Florida, a boutique firm specializing in unremarkable Stepford Wife luxury condos, wasn’t even a top twenty player in the real estate market, but for half a century it had been impossible to not do well. You built a tower near the ocean and every unit was sold before you even broke ground. When Tony first began dating Gail, Corey had been a twerp prep school kid already eyeing fraternity rows at Florida’s most debauched campuses, and Tony had never stopped looking at him that way. Even in his midforties, dressed dapper in a jet-black blazer over a gray polo and what looked like a thousand-dollar Seiko watch on his wrist, Tony still saw him as Gail’s stupid little white brother who’d farted on Tony’s arm when he met her family for the first time. Nine years after Gail’s adoption, Corey had been the surprise pregnancy, and though it always seemed like her parents were prouder of their ultra-bright adopted Black daughter, boy, did they let this little biological shit get away with anything. Corey still had the same buzzed head, eyes that shrank mischievously when he smiled, and devil-may-care, brash individualism signaled to exhaustion in every detail of his person.
Corey pocketed his phone. “Don’t you get groupies from all the fame, man? Like enviro-sluts?”
When Gail was dying, Tony had morbidly assumed the only silver lining to the whole situation was that he’d never have to see this arrogant little prick ever again. Oddly, Corey had not allowed that to happen. He’d stayed in close touch, invited Tony and the girls out to Florida once a year, and bought Holly and Cat an extravagant, over-the-top gift every birthday and Christmas. Corey still annoyed the hell out of Tony, but he would combat this by thinking of how he’d seen Corey once, unarmored, in Scripps Memorial, when Gail was really near the end. It had just been the three of them in the room, Gail wasted and failing, Corey holding her hand. He didn’t just look young in that moment, he looked preadolescent, back to the obnoxious but vulnerable little boy Gail had helped raise. “You were a perfect big sister,” he told her, gasping back tears. “You always kept me straight.”
“And you were a total pain in the ass,” Gail had said, her voice gone, her eyes too hollow to land the humor. Corey had buried his head in her fragile shoulder and cried so hard Tony thought he might choke.
“So.” Corey now picked up a butter knife and began twirling it baton-style, gazing out at the sun-dappled waves. “This guy introduced a bill in the state senate, right? It would require real estate brokers to disclose any risk of sea level rise for the properties they sell. Friendly legislators killed it but…” He trailed off. It dawned on Tony that Corey hadn’t driven over from Sarasota so they could simply grab lunch and catch up. He pointed off into the bay. “For sure, they have to elevate those highways connecting Miami Beach, but they can’t raise taxes to do it. That’ll just spook the market. The big thing—now that we’ve killed that monstrosity Randall was trying to pass—there’s a vote coming on the National Flood Insurance Program. They always want to raise the rates without understanding the effect it has on housing prices, you know? Then the banks want a bigger percentage of the property’s value insured, but the insurance companies don’t want to write those bigger policies, and so the banks don’t want to lend a thirty-year mortgage. You know?”
“Nope. Are you trying to ask me something?”
Lounging maximally, his arm draped over the back of the chair, Corey laughed. “You should retire down here man. I could set you up with a fabulous place. Nothing like wasting the day away in paradise.”
“You know what the deal with Florida is, Corey? Florida’s been underwater for most of the billions of years the planet’s been around. It’s only recently, geologically speaking, that Florida stuck its neck out. That’s because all these organisms swimming around the shallow water shat and died. And all their shit and dead bodies piled up and cemented into limestone. Florida is literally a pile of shit and death.”
Corey laughed some more, and Tony indulged his fantasy of Corey’s properties all washing away.
“And I bet that shit-and-corpse limestone isn’t looking as sturdy as it used to.” Corey’s laughter tapered off. The knife stopped in his hand as well. “We get the news up north. The spring rains? And the last couple of king tides? Septic tanks bursting out of the ground and riding down flooded streets. Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery, all those remains boiling out of the boxes like a zombie movie. Bet it’s getting just a little harder to sell people on paradise.”
Corey made a small, unamused sound. He set the knife down and sat up. “Okay, Tony. Level with me then. We’ve got sunny day flooding at high tide that’s swamping our projects. Obviously, the cemetery incident was a bit of a black eye. But is this sea level rise—is this thing going to be real?”
Tony just stared at him, blinking.
“Are you fucking mad? Corey, I’ve been telling you this for twenty-five goddamn years. I wrote an entire fucking book about it.”
“Yeah, but what are we talking here? Like a foot, maybe a couple feet—that’s manageable. But then you’ve got doomsayers going around telling people it’s going to be six feet. Six feet? How’s that even possible?”
Tony slapped his forehead without even thinking of how theatrical it might look.
“Corey, you’ll be lucky as hell if it’s only six. Do you know what the Thwaites Glacier is? Or the Pine Island Glacier? That’s the whole reason I’m down here. That was my whole presentation to the city.”
Corey pouted his lower lip and shook his head. “What’s their deal?”
“Those are marine-terminating glaciers in West Antarctica that are disintegrating. Fast. And once they’re gone? They’re holding back a mountain of ice, enough to raise sea levels by a significant amount in the next fifty years. This…” He tossed his left hand at the bay and his right at the interior of the restaurant. “All this is fucked. All this is gone. I’ve been saying this to you since the girls were babies, and all you did was quote Fox News at me.”
Corey gulped his spritzer. “What do we do about it? I read this thing—they can put sulfur up in the sky and we can cool down the planet that way?”
“Corey, even if we prematurely liquidated all the investments sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, even if we took those trillions of dollars and applied it to a crash course to save the world, Florida is still going under. Florida was probably doomed by 1995. Randall’s bill? That was this generation’s last-ditch effort to save the planet from mass extinction. You know what extinction is? That means you starve to death. That means your family drowns. That means everyone you know and love watches the world waste away until they’re dead too.”
Corey finished off his wine spritzer and signaled to the waiter for another.
“Jesus, Tony. No wonder you can’t get any snatch.”
* * *
His flight was delayed two hours going home, so he sat in Miami International Airport too distracted to read. His attention was momentarily captured by CNN. Rory Baumgart, the white nationalist billionaire, had dumped millions into Jennifer Braden’s challenge, even as the Republican Party was changing the rules for the primaries to protect President Randall. Russ Mackowski was meeting with the evangelical leader The Pastor, in hopes of winning his support because he trailed both women. The two of them appeared together on-screen, Mackowski wind-burned, flinty, and impatient, the Evangelical handsome and well-kempt, his hair shellacked to his skull. Then the news moved out west where the worst wildfire season in history was raging across California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, and Montana with three Canadian provinces ablaze as well. Across the North American continent, fire season had killed nearly four hundred civilians and twenty-three firefighters.
And yet, the anchor moved on to a segment called “Shame on Who?” The subject: Holly’s former boss.
He’d been skeptical of Kate Morris, and he’d told Holly as much, but for a minute, he’d wondered if they were going to do it. After they got Randall elected and flipped enough House and Senate seats, it did feel like there was momentum for a real piece of legislation. And his daughter, the stalwart optimist and bullheaded, nose-to-the-grindstone worker bee, would be a part of it. It would make him unbearably proud to watch her succeed where he had so miserably failed. Then to see how it had all ended last fall. Utterly ignominious and with an implosion that left this police-state wreckage in its wake. And now this: Two more FBF staffers had accused Morris of unwanted sexual advances. One young woman claimed she’d led her into a closet during a fundraising soiree in New York City and performed oral sex on her. Sure, the media’s appetite for the salacious was appalling, but how could this Morris kid not learn to keep it in her pants? It was almost pathological.
He’d had enough and put in his earbuds and turned on some Bach. To let the infotainment bath of the day stream over you was to slowly scrub away at the skin of your own humanity.
* * *
You have a typo, he wrote to Holly the next day when he was back at his abode in New Haven. Page 6 you wrote “seal level rise.” Although an extreme seal level rise would be problem too. And he added a smiley animation that did backflips before slipping on a banana.
One had to be careful with criticism when it came to daughters. He would never forget how in the first year after Gail died he’d picked up Holly from track practice and during an otherwise unremarkable ride home said something about how her baby weight looked like it was melting away. He’d thought nothing of it until months later, when Holly’s arms and legs had turned to matchsticks and her face shriveled, cheekbones becoming uncomfortably prominent. He asked if she was eating, and she spat back in his face, “I thought it best if I lose my baby weight.”
Or at least she spat it as much as quiet Holly could ever spit anything, with reasonableness and detachment and curiosity. He never really managed to backtrack from that one, and Holly saw a therapist for two years as she reluctantly returned to eating a normal diet. The incident had terrified and shamed him. How easy it was as a father, especially a single father, especially a workaholic single father, to let some innocuous comment slip free and have it go off in a child’s life like a mortar shell. Maybe he was an occasional failure as a parent, but he trudged on. That’s what parenting was, never getting over all the grave mistakes you’d made while cherishing a special fear: that this part of yourself, external to you, was in constant danger.
He was thinking of that teenage incident when Holly called him.
“Kiddo! Older One! I read the thing you sent. Also, I saw Uncle Corey when I was down in Miami. You won’t believe what he asked me about…”
“Dad, have you seen the news?”
He stopped. That sound in her voice. “Not since yesterday?”
“The fires. Right in LA.”
A quick Google search, and he was rewarded with images of the Hollywood sign burning.
“Two of them started yesterday, and there’s a new one today.”
“Where are they?” He was already pulling up a map of the city.
“One of them, the Canyonback, is west of the 405, but two of them are closer to Catherine. The Wisdom Tree Fire is really close to her.”
The cursor churned as the page struggled to load, but Tony could already picture the chunk of Los Angeles she was talking about. The city’s landmark mountain range where the wildland-urban interface stretched from Glendale to the Pacific Ocean.
“Have you talked to her?” he asked.
“No. She hasn’t answered her phone. Or my texts.”
“What’s her address?”
“I have it here somewhere. She’s on the border of Los Feliz and Silver Lake.”
“Hold on.”
He found the address in his phone and plugged it into the map.
“She looks pretty far south of the fires right now. She’s definitely nowhere near the Hollywood sign.” He clicked back over to the tab where the white letters were in flames. The picture was everywhere. “I’ll keep trying her.”
“Tell her to call me if you talk to her.”
“Will do. Love you, Holl.”
“Love you, Dad.”
He called Catherine, but it went to voice mail. He left a message and texted her as well. Hey Khaleesi, everything good there? He wanted to add Pack a bag just in case of these fires but stopped himself. He knew it annoyed her when he was overbearing or when he worried. He clicked to video of the fire. The 405 was shut down because both sides of the Sepulveda Pass were ablaze. Seven hundred acres had burned in the heart of Los Angeles and an additional two thousand in the Verdugo Mountains. A lot of rich people’s homes were on fire in the Hollywood Hills, but there were no fatalities and firefighters had the Canyonback 80 percent contained. He picked up his phone and added: The fires have your dad a little freaked out. Just gimme a call when you can.
Every channel was covering it. One legendary film director had lost both his homes. A rapper was having his wardrobe shipped out on trucks as the flames wrapped around Bel-Air. The Getty Museum was moving its collection to the basement. The smoke rose like a mushroom cloud. By eight thirty Catherine still hadn’t called or texted, and it occurred to him to call Ash Hasan.
“Tony. How are you? Seth and I were just about to sit down to dinner.”
“Sorry to bother you, man. I’m wondering if you’ve got any inside track on the Los Angeles fires?”
“I’m certainly keeping abreast of the news. What do you mean?”
Tony chewed his tongue. What was he asking exactly? He’d known Hasan for a few years now, and at first the guy had rubbed him all kinds of the wrong way, just a grab bag of peculiarities and quacking hands. Not that it was PC to be weirded out by these full-spectrum cases, but Tony couldn’t help it. Over time, though, he came to appreciate that his distaste might be part and parcel of a thing other people called “jealousy.” An undeniably brilliant man like Hasan got under his skin because of Tony’s own ego. After Tony told him off during their secret conference back in ’29, Hasan had nevertheless continued to seek his advice on drafting LaFray-Kastor. Begrudgingly, Tony began to admire the man. As the bill neared the vote in the House, Tony found himself at lunch with Hasan, awkwardly apologizing for his prickly nature.
“That’s amusing,” said Hasan sans any amusement. “I never noticed. You appreciate empiricism. One of the five people left in the world, I believe. That was a joke,” he said too quickly, his timing woefully inhuman.
“Congresswoman Aamanzaihou has been dealing with emergency packages for the wildfires all summer,” Hasan now offered. After the mutation of PRIRA, Hasan was tapped to lead the US Global Change Research Program, and because Joy LaFray got run off in disgrace, he now powwowed exclusively with the last card-carrying member of the decimated climate hawks. “I’ve drafted an executive summary on the situation. I could send it to you?”
Tony chuffed a laugh. “Ash, last time I read one of your summaries there was seven pages on you and your boyfriend shopping at Target.”
“I find adding autobiographical detail aids in the writing process.”
“Yeah, okay, send it to me when you get the chance.”
Eventually, Tony fell into a restless sleep while the news recycled images of smoke gathering into a violent thunderhead over the city.
* * *
He woke at 6 a.m. when his cat, Tyrion, jumped into his lap. The cat stared at him with expectant, eerie intelligence. Wake up, old man. You’re running out of time. Tony realized his phone was thrumming on the coffee table. Holly.
“You heard from Catherine?” he asked.
“No.”
They were both silent.
“Dad, the fires are worse. There’s a new one in Griffith Park. That’s just to the north of her.”
Tony rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. “Well, why isn’t she answering?”
“I don’t know. She’s home. Or at least her phone is. We’ve got find-a-friend turned on with each other.”
