The Deluge, page 73
I didn’t want to talk about my family anymore. We always circled the same things: Dad’s affair, Allie’s bitchiness, Erik’s shittiness, and my mother hanging by a black electrical cord from the banister. The first time I told Maria, she didn’t even blink. “You’re not the first person to find a loved one dead of suicide, and you won’t be the last,” she had said. I’d considered being offended by her dismissive approach toward what I, at the time, felt was a shocking and unconquerable trauma, but by our third session I’d decided I liked this attitude, and I liked her. To Maria, nothing was surprising, nothing too traumatic to be processed and overcome. However, I had lied to Maria about the dreams. They were nightmares, and I did wake up sweating.
“How’s Fred?”
“He’s good. Stressed from work, but good.”
“You’re spending enough time together.”
“Yes. After I talked to him, we sort of worked out an agreement. At least two evenings and one day a week when he has to put all the screens away. No data, no reports, no investor calls.”
“How do you feel about his divorce or lack thereof?”
“I understand where Fred’s coming from. His wife is going to massacre him if he asks for it. He stands to lose sooo much money, and trust me, she’s vindictive. She will not let this go easily. She hates me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Way back at the hearing for Fred Jr. when he got out, just the way she shook my hand. Fred’s only eight years older than me, but maybe it’s the younger woman thing.”
“This bothers you?”
“No, but—this is dumb, but I want the wedding. I want to invite all my old friends from college or Chicago and say ‘I do.’ Get my stupid sister to be the matron of honor. Maybe that’s retrograde, but it means something to me.”
“That’s not retrograde at all, Jacquelyn. You’re asking for something utterly reasonable. And you know what? If it costs Fred half his money, he’ll still be more than fine. He can ask you for an allowance.”
* * *
I had the doorman standing there for a moment, wind blowing in from the street, because the TV overlooking the art deco lobby caught my attention. CNN had a camera crew pointed at a view of Manhattan looking south across the East River. An enormous crowd had gathered in front of two loading bay doors at a warehouse because a truck had crashed into one of the metal shutters, warping it inward. The chyron said something about looting, and I felt a curtain of dread, but there was the doorman, smiling, waiting for me. Exiting onto Park Avenue, I decided to walk. The day was cool for late April, the sun half-fugitive behind a cloudbank, but I never walked much anymore. I took the time to mull what I’d said in the session.
After the funeral, we’d sold the house for pennies to an ag company. The flood damage wasn’t worth any salvage job, and it was torn down. The home that had been in our family since 1902, that had survived tornadoes, storms, and countless brutal winters, finally fell to the Great Eastern Flood. Mom left behind only debts, and I knew it was the last time I’d ever set foot in Amber, Iowa, a town that had all but collapsed save a couple of big-box stores and fast-food joints. That my childhood home was gone, it hit me now, as it sometimes did, and I saw in my mind’s eye my father hunched over the soil, grabbing a loose handful and kneading it between his enormous hands to test its properties, to feel close to it.
This memory brought a surprising bout of tears as I walked up through Hell’s Kitchen. The wind blew ragged over the city, rushing between the skyscrapers. Not far from our building, I passed a gas station where five kids stood in the way of a car, holding signs, arguing with a policeman who was trying to scoot them along. One sign read WHAT YOU DO HERE STARVES THE WORLD; another, WE ARE OUT OF TIME with a picture of a clock; another, WE ARE THE DELUGE. I overheard the cop in his New Yawk drawl tell them, “You can either stand outta the way or I can take ya to the precinct. Then your little protest is over. Your call.” Waiting at a crosswalk, I turned back to see the teenagers all dutifully complying.
Past our doorman and the security team, the trickling fountain and tall bamboo plants, down the handsome slate-tiled hallway, up the private elevator. We were Upper West Side, an expensive zip code to be sure, but not Billionaires’ Row. For a relatively cheap $5.6 million we had our own floor, forty-five hundred square feet, a Juliet balcony, and a fireplace. Most importantly, it was not ground floor, and the building had the best flood-resistant measures architecture could buy: natural gas generators, clean water storage in case of power outages, and all heating, ventilation, and electrical machinery elevated seven meters above street level.
I found Fred in his office, hunched forward, eyes darting in his Apple ARs like a boy watching Saturday-morning cartoons. His hands swiped at the air as he manipulated the augmented world, while at his desk, three old-fashioned screens streamed data on Tara Fund’s holdings.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked absently.
“Therapy.”
“Figure yourself out yet?”
“Maria thinks I should leave you if you don’t divorce Linda and marry me.”
“Is Maria going to reimburse us for the millions Linda will take out of our pockets on her way out the door?”
Kicking off my workaday pumps, I slid into his lap, draping my arms around his neck and kissing him. He wore a charcoal zip-neck sweater that set off the salt and pepper of his beard and cool slate of his eyes.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He kissed me again. The Liebherr all-purpose cleaning robot zoomed quietly past us on its way to some detected dirt I’d no doubt tracked in. I barely noticed the oversized egg pod and its wizard arms anymore.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“The usual. Komatireddy has us up to our necks in the NHS, but if Parliament gets cold feet and backs off—I mean, these valuations are going to tank and we’ll be out a fortune.”
These days I was hearing a lot about Komatireddy, one of Tara Fund’s star analysts, as he made aggressive bets on the companies set to benefit from the full privatization of the NHS, which was sending England into political conniptions. Marches in the streets as the Tories moved toward the long-overdue reforms. I didn’t have much of a stomach to hear about it now, but my eyes drifted to the report anyway.
“I meant to tell you, Linda’s in town, so we were going to get dinner tomorrow.”
“Linda as in my Linda?” he said, bewildered.
“No, dummy, Linda Holiday. From my Don Draper days.”
“Oh, right right.”
“Maybe it would be nice to get drinks with your should-be-ex-wife, Fred.”
The report was called Positioned for Disruption: Strategy for Energy, Commodities, and Security Investment.
“That’s quite the apocalyptic title.”
“Smart kids on that team, but they’re hyped on the grandeur of thinking they can puppeteer the world.” He clicked all three screens off at once and pushed the ARs up onto his head. Without the throb of the data, his office returned to just being a bright white room with a beautiful view of Manhattan to the south. The floor-to-ceiling windows could tint to control the temperature on hot days. “Wanna get lunch?”
* * *
Fred spent most of lunch talking shop. The fund had a year as the newest belle of the ball, but that was long gone. Tara had stalled out, for now, as a midlevel fund, working with $2 billion in assets. Other firms had played the global food shock better.
“We’re in for nearly eighty thousand hectares of farmland in Ukraine. I told Peter everyone has assurances the new Kremlinized government will not mess with these holdings, which is why Love allowed Russia to go in in the first place.” Fred cracked a piece of sourdough over his soup. He’d been getting treatments at the Noxium Spa. He looked young, but the tan gave his skin an orange hue that looked less than natural. “Thirteen years ago it’s life or death for democracy, but now the world needs that ag production. China, on the other hand, has everyone freaked.”
“What’s happening in China?” I asked. “I mean, aside from the riots and hunger and—not to be dismissive,” I added, rolling my eyes at the way I sounded. Everyone in finance begins speaking like this, and I tried to at least catch myself in the act.
“These student groups—or whatever they are—6Degrees in Cantonese. They’ve locked themselves in a couple of police stations and a military base. Somehow they managed to take over prime government installations without firing a shot. All hacking and subterfuge and occupation tactics. Stuff they copied from Morris and the siege.”
“How does that affect Tara, though?”
Fred’s eyebrows shot up with a goofy, knowing look. “Chinese government’s never exactly been known for its tolerance of disobedience. Kashgar is in meltdown with the Uyghur situation, but people are in the streets all over the country. The rural areas are eating about a bowl of rice a day. Peter said to me, ‘It’s easier to price nuclear war than it is civil unrest in China.’ ”
“What about that report.” I speared a shrimp on my fork. “Chaos of Investment or something? I’d like to read that.”
“Sure. It’s based on proprietary modeling, though, so it’ll have encrypted portions,” he explained, referring to the security procedures Peter had put in place around the al-Hasan model. “Basic premise is that the socioecological situation in the Arctic is going to be one of the biggest investment opportunities of the century, and it has to be handled by the good guys, or the whole region could end up strip-mined. We have companies that think they can fit these operations into an ESG portfolio.”
Though he was still nominally the head of investor relations, Fred had taken a much greater interest in the firm’s day-to-day bets. I’d focused my work on Tara’s ESG investing and philanthropic work. I wanted Tara to carve out an advantage by becoming one of the most socially responsible hedge funds on the street. This wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. These positions and trades moved so fast, powered by incomprehensible complex systems models, and socially responsible investing could become an ever-retreating goal. Still, I thought this was an excellent way to capture the attention of new investors. I’d even managed to convince a reporter for the New Yorker to profile the fund, but that had turned into a sticky PR situation. The reporter, Farooki, had been looking to court me, not the other way around. She was interested in a firm called ANøNosiki, which I knew nothing about. After a few frustrating back-and-forths on the subject, I referred her to Media Relations, and Fred got in touch with a few contacts to kill the story from there. The name ANøNosiki stuck with me, though.
“Really? Mining the Arctic as ESG?”
He looked up at me and wiped his mouth. “Well, people have been ringing alarm bells on the melt for decades, right? But the warming is having all these incredible benefits. We now have ice-free ship passage in the Arctic, the greatest boon to world trade since the Clinton administration. Then there are the new energy horizons in Greenland, just these unfathomable fortunes of minerals, uranium, and even oil and gas if the majors can lean on them to reopen exploration. And the precision companies can operate with now—we’re talking minimal impact. It’ll be like they weren’t even there.”
I laughed. “You’ve never been much of a recycler.”
“Come on, Jack, I’m serious. We’re forging this new direction—it’s exciting. Peter wants to call it ‘socially responsible extraction,’ but I don’t like the word ‘extraction.’ We need another term there.”
When Fred sat with investors, he would talk about growing up in Humboldt County and how his dad had lost job after job as the timber industry was more or less legislated and regulated out of California. “The environmentalists were basically at war with these working-class logging guys, and it was just so baffling and backward,” he once told me. “My dad loved the forest—hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, that’s all we did. It was our home, and it just felt so unfair the way we got vilified. And it didn’t have to be like that. It was these few rapacious investors versus hard-line, no-compromise greens, and neither side actually lived there. No one cared about the communities they were invading or the ecosystems they claimed to be protecting. And when the Sustainable Future folks hired us, I met with some of the guys in the production fields, and I can see the exact same thing happening in oil and gas. All these high-paying working-class jobs that could be gone soon. I grew up watching my dad lost and depressed until he had the heart attack, so it’s hard not to let all this get a little personal.”
It wasn’t until he told me this story that I really understood Fred—why, despite his wild successes in two of the most competitive fields in American business, he carried such a broken heart. We both learned an instinctive lesson as children. To paraphrase my father: If you’re not on top of the mountain, then you’re scrambling over loose rock, and that’s a damn dangerous place to be. Since I’d become wealthy beyond anything I’d ever imagined for myself, I’d been trying to focus my efforts on giving back, but like Fred, I carried the secret knowledge that so many of our affluent peers would never understand: what it felt like to be broke in America. How it could practically change your DNA.
Looking up from his meal, he asked, “Do you remember all the fears of peak oil?”
“Not really.”
“That was the boogeyman in the 2000s. Then of course, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling come along and suddenly America’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia. Demand for energy will never peak, so if you keep prices low, oil and gas are cheap enough to get to market over anything. And now we have innovation with aerosol injection about to prove doomsayers wrong about global warming.”
I picked at the shrimp, not wanting to waste it, but also fully stuffed.
“You never worry, do you?”
“About what?
“Heat storms.”
We’d spent the summer of ’34 holed up in the Hamptons to escape the frying city. For ten days, I barely went outside except to get in and out of the car, anxiously watching news of the siege as sweat-soaked reporters described the agony of the temperature. Fred rolled his eyes.
“Our boy Norm Nate is about to corner the market on albedo management, and once he starts, the governments of the world are going to have to keep paying him to put those nanoparticles into the sky for the next century, at least. Managing the temperature will become about as easy as you and I playing with a thermostat. As long as we don’t elect anyone dumb enough to interfere and strand good tech fixes—that’s the only thing that freaks me out, if an AOC or Aamanzaihou administration shuts down innovation. All this to say, we might be making a few campaign contributions to The Pastor next year.”
I laughed so hard the shrimp trembled off the tines of my fork and splashed into a puddle of yogurt.
“Fred! You’re not serious.”
“I might be.”
At the mention of his name, a familiar set of clashing emotions descended: the revulsion at his politics, the fear of his future candidacy since early polls had him well ahead in the Republican primary, and of course the secret I kept of our encounter, one which I now planned to take to my grave. It had grown difficult to see his face and not become flush with guilt and an uneasy revulsion. Years earlier I’d spent a weekend reading everything I could about him on the internet, trying to decide if his new shtick was all a ruse because that would have made him so much less frightening. Now I clicked, scrolled, or swiped away from the page if I saw his name in a headline.
“Fred. The guy is telling crowds that his blood can cure cancer.”
“Hey, maybe it can. We have some positions with biotech companies that are looking into it.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m just saying, you can’t overlook what he’s got in his favor, which is a commitment to deregulation, lower tax burdens, and aggressive energy policy.”
“So does Vic Love!”
“Yeah, and he gunned down hundreds of people in public. Then he turns around and pardons Pietrus and Kate Morris and all the rest.”
“Love did not pardon them,” I corrected. “The courts threw out the case against Pietrus.”
“But everyone knows he cut a deal to neuter the Senate investigation by dropping charges against Morris and all the occupiers—are you still defending her?”
We’d flown to London to escape the heat and close on our new place a few weeks before the government finally stormed the Mall. Everyone had known some kind of police action was coming, but when I saw the images of the rampage, I sat on the bed and began crying. When I heard the numbers of dead, I wept again, and vowed I would do something, but what do you do in that situation? Call your senator? Donate money to the ACLU? There wasn’t a meaningful outlet for my outrage or grief, so I did nothing while the media screamed back and forth at itself. A few months later we were at dinner with Peter O’Connell, his wife, Haniya, and two other couples, Tara clients. When the conversation turned to politics, one of the wives casually declared that what happened was “a shame, but Love did what he had to do to restore order.”
This woman did not know that Haniya’s brother had lost his husband there, and I didn’t blame her for losing her temper. “There’s an interview where you can watch the families of the people killed, and I suggest you take the time, you ignorant Nazi bitch.” She stood and left the restaurant. Peter went after her. Later, I was ashamed that I’d said nothing and remained for the rest of the meal so Fred could smooth things over.
When Fred and I spoke of it that night, he sounded as appalled and sorrowful as I felt. How did the country get to this place? He told me he would never vote or send a dollar in support of Love or any Democrat who stood by him ever again, but he was also furious at Kate Morris. “She led those people into that,” he said. “She used them. Sacrificed their lives for her lost cause.” A minority of Democrats screamed for impeachment but a deal was made. In exchange for concluding the investigation into the massacre, the government dropped all charges and released its prisoners, including most of those rounded up in the prior two years under PRIRA. The slaughter of over seven hundred American citizens in the capital was quickly scoured from the news by skyrocketing food prices, refugee flows from South America and the Caribbean, the Mars mission finally being declared lost, and The Pastor returning to the scene with more bombastic displays. The common refrain became “The country has to move forward.” Most of the Democrats we talked to repeated that almost as an incantation. A sign of the times that this seemingly history-making event could be swapped out in the news cycle in a matter of days.
“How’s Fred?”
“He’s good. Stressed from work, but good.”
“You’re spending enough time together.”
“Yes. After I talked to him, we sort of worked out an agreement. At least two evenings and one day a week when he has to put all the screens away. No data, no reports, no investor calls.”
“How do you feel about his divorce or lack thereof?”
“I understand where Fred’s coming from. His wife is going to massacre him if he asks for it. He stands to lose sooo much money, and trust me, she’s vindictive. She will not let this go easily. She hates me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Way back at the hearing for Fred Jr. when he got out, just the way she shook my hand. Fred’s only eight years older than me, but maybe it’s the younger woman thing.”
“This bothers you?”
“No, but—this is dumb, but I want the wedding. I want to invite all my old friends from college or Chicago and say ‘I do.’ Get my stupid sister to be the matron of honor. Maybe that’s retrograde, but it means something to me.”
“That’s not retrograde at all, Jacquelyn. You’re asking for something utterly reasonable. And you know what? If it costs Fred half his money, he’ll still be more than fine. He can ask you for an allowance.”
* * *
I had the doorman standing there for a moment, wind blowing in from the street, because the TV overlooking the art deco lobby caught my attention. CNN had a camera crew pointed at a view of Manhattan looking south across the East River. An enormous crowd had gathered in front of two loading bay doors at a warehouse because a truck had crashed into one of the metal shutters, warping it inward. The chyron said something about looting, and I felt a curtain of dread, but there was the doorman, smiling, waiting for me. Exiting onto Park Avenue, I decided to walk. The day was cool for late April, the sun half-fugitive behind a cloudbank, but I never walked much anymore. I took the time to mull what I’d said in the session.
After the funeral, we’d sold the house for pennies to an ag company. The flood damage wasn’t worth any salvage job, and it was torn down. The home that had been in our family since 1902, that had survived tornadoes, storms, and countless brutal winters, finally fell to the Great Eastern Flood. Mom left behind only debts, and I knew it was the last time I’d ever set foot in Amber, Iowa, a town that had all but collapsed save a couple of big-box stores and fast-food joints. That my childhood home was gone, it hit me now, as it sometimes did, and I saw in my mind’s eye my father hunched over the soil, grabbing a loose handful and kneading it between his enormous hands to test its properties, to feel close to it.
This memory brought a surprising bout of tears as I walked up through Hell’s Kitchen. The wind blew ragged over the city, rushing between the skyscrapers. Not far from our building, I passed a gas station where five kids stood in the way of a car, holding signs, arguing with a policeman who was trying to scoot them along. One sign read WHAT YOU DO HERE STARVES THE WORLD; another, WE ARE OUT OF TIME with a picture of a clock; another, WE ARE THE DELUGE. I overheard the cop in his New Yawk drawl tell them, “You can either stand outta the way or I can take ya to the precinct. Then your little protest is over. Your call.” Waiting at a crosswalk, I turned back to see the teenagers all dutifully complying.
Past our doorman and the security team, the trickling fountain and tall bamboo plants, down the handsome slate-tiled hallway, up the private elevator. We were Upper West Side, an expensive zip code to be sure, but not Billionaires’ Row. For a relatively cheap $5.6 million we had our own floor, forty-five hundred square feet, a Juliet balcony, and a fireplace. Most importantly, it was not ground floor, and the building had the best flood-resistant measures architecture could buy: natural gas generators, clean water storage in case of power outages, and all heating, ventilation, and electrical machinery elevated seven meters above street level.
I found Fred in his office, hunched forward, eyes darting in his Apple ARs like a boy watching Saturday-morning cartoons. His hands swiped at the air as he manipulated the augmented world, while at his desk, three old-fashioned screens streamed data on Tara Fund’s holdings.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked absently.
“Therapy.”
“Figure yourself out yet?”
“Maria thinks I should leave you if you don’t divorce Linda and marry me.”
“Is Maria going to reimburse us for the millions Linda will take out of our pockets on her way out the door?”
Kicking off my workaday pumps, I slid into his lap, draping my arms around his neck and kissing him. He wore a charcoal zip-neck sweater that set off the salt and pepper of his beard and cool slate of his eyes.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He kissed me again. The Liebherr all-purpose cleaning robot zoomed quietly past us on its way to some detected dirt I’d no doubt tracked in. I barely noticed the oversized egg pod and its wizard arms anymore.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“The usual. Komatireddy has us up to our necks in the NHS, but if Parliament gets cold feet and backs off—I mean, these valuations are going to tank and we’ll be out a fortune.”
These days I was hearing a lot about Komatireddy, one of Tara Fund’s star analysts, as he made aggressive bets on the companies set to benefit from the full privatization of the NHS, which was sending England into political conniptions. Marches in the streets as the Tories moved toward the long-overdue reforms. I didn’t have much of a stomach to hear about it now, but my eyes drifted to the report anyway.
“I meant to tell you, Linda’s in town, so we were going to get dinner tomorrow.”
“Linda as in my Linda?” he said, bewildered.
“No, dummy, Linda Holiday. From my Don Draper days.”
“Oh, right right.”
“Maybe it would be nice to get drinks with your should-be-ex-wife, Fred.”
The report was called Positioned for Disruption: Strategy for Energy, Commodities, and Security Investment.
“That’s quite the apocalyptic title.”
“Smart kids on that team, but they’re hyped on the grandeur of thinking they can puppeteer the world.” He clicked all three screens off at once and pushed the ARs up onto his head. Without the throb of the data, his office returned to just being a bright white room with a beautiful view of Manhattan to the south. The floor-to-ceiling windows could tint to control the temperature on hot days. “Wanna get lunch?”
* * *
Fred spent most of lunch talking shop. The fund had a year as the newest belle of the ball, but that was long gone. Tara had stalled out, for now, as a midlevel fund, working with $2 billion in assets. Other firms had played the global food shock better.
“We’re in for nearly eighty thousand hectares of farmland in Ukraine. I told Peter everyone has assurances the new Kremlinized government will not mess with these holdings, which is why Love allowed Russia to go in in the first place.” Fred cracked a piece of sourdough over his soup. He’d been getting treatments at the Noxium Spa. He looked young, but the tan gave his skin an orange hue that looked less than natural. “Thirteen years ago it’s life or death for democracy, but now the world needs that ag production. China, on the other hand, has everyone freaked.”
“What’s happening in China?” I asked. “I mean, aside from the riots and hunger and—not to be dismissive,” I added, rolling my eyes at the way I sounded. Everyone in finance begins speaking like this, and I tried to at least catch myself in the act.
“These student groups—or whatever they are—6Degrees in Cantonese. They’ve locked themselves in a couple of police stations and a military base. Somehow they managed to take over prime government installations without firing a shot. All hacking and subterfuge and occupation tactics. Stuff they copied from Morris and the siege.”
“How does that affect Tara, though?”
Fred’s eyebrows shot up with a goofy, knowing look. “Chinese government’s never exactly been known for its tolerance of disobedience. Kashgar is in meltdown with the Uyghur situation, but people are in the streets all over the country. The rural areas are eating about a bowl of rice a day. Peter said to me, ‘It’s easier to price nuclear war than it is civil unrest in China.’ ”
“What about that report.” I speared a shrimp on my fork. “Chaos of Investment or something? I’d like to read that.”
“Sure. It’s based on proprietary modeling, though, so it’ll have encrypted portions,” he explained, referring to the security procedures Peter had put in place around the al-Hasan model. “Basic premise is that the socioecological situation in the Arctic is going to be one of the biggest investment opportunities of the century, and it has to be handled by the good guys, or the whole region could end up strip-mined. We have companies that think they can fit these operations into an ESG portfolio.”
Though he was still nominally the head of investor relations, Fred had taken a much greater interest in the firm’s day-to-day bets. I’d focused my work on Tara’s ESG investing and philanthropic work. I wanted Tara to carve out an advantage by becoming one of the most socially responsible hedge funds on the street. This wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. These positions and trades moved so fast, powered by incomprehensible complex systems models, and socially responsible investing could become an ever-retreating goal. Still, I thought this was an excellent way to capture the attention of new investors. I’d even managed to convince a reporter for the New Yorker to profile the fund, but that had turned into a sticky PR situation. The reporter, Farooki, had been looking to court me, not the other way around. She was interested in a firm called ANøNosiki, which I knew nothing about. After a few frustrating back-and-forths on the subject, I referred her to Media Relations, and Fred got in touch with a few contacts to kill the story from there. The name ANøNosiki stuck with me, though.
“Really? Mining the Arctic as ESG?”
He looked up at me and wiped his mouth. “Well, people have been ringing alarm bells on the melt for decades, right? But the warming is having all these incredible benefits. We now have ice-free ship passage in the Arctic, the greatest boon to world trade since the Clinton administration. Then there are the new energy horizons in Greenland, just these unfathomable fortunes of minerals, uranium, and even oil and gas if the majors can lean on them to reopen exploration. And the precision companies can operate with now—we’re talking minimal impact. It’ll be like they weren’t even there.”
I laughed. “You’ve never been much of a recycler.”
“Come on, Jack, I’m serious. We’re forging this new direction—it’s exciting. Peter wants to call it ‘socially responsible extraction,’ but I don’t like the word ‘extraction.’ We need another term there.”
When Fred sat with investors, he would talk about growing up in Humboldt County and how his dad had lost job after job as the timber industry was more or less legislated and regulated out of California. “The environmentalists were basically at war with these working-class logging guys, and it was just so baffling and backward,” he once told me. “My dad loved the forest—hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, that’s all we did. It was our home, and it just felt so unfair the way we got vilified. And it didn’t have to be like that. It was these few rapacious investors versus hard-line, no-compromise greens, and neither side actually lived there. No one cared about the communities they were invading or the ecosystems they claimed to be protecting. And when the Sustainable Future folks hired us, I met with some of the guys in the production fields, and I can see the exact same thing happening in oil and gas. All these high-paying working-class jobs that could be gone soon. I grew up watching my dad lost and depressed until he had the heart attack, so it’s hard not to let all this get a little personal.”
It wasn’t until he told me this story that I really understood Fred—why, despite his wild successes in two of the most competitive fields in American business, he carried such a broken heart. We both learned an instinctive lesson as children. To paraphrase my father: If you’re not on top of the mountain, then you’re scrambling over loose rock, and that’s a damn dangerous place to be. Since I’d become wealthy beyond anything I’d ever imagined for myself, I’d been trying to focus my efforts on giving back, but like Fred, I carried the secret knowledge that so many of our affluent peers would never understand: what it felt like to be broke in America. How it could practically change your DNA.
Looking up from his meal, he asked, “Do you remember all the fears of peak oil?”
“Not really.”
“That was the boogeyman in the 2000s. Then of course, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling come along and suddenly America’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia. Demand for energy will never peak, so if you keep prices low, oil and gas are cheap enough to get to market over anything. And now we have innovation with aerosol injection about to prove doomsayers wrong about global warming.”
I picked at the shrimp, not wanting to waste it, but also fully stuffed.
“You never worry, do you?”
“About what?
“Heat storms.”
We’d spent the summer of ’34 holed up in the Hamptons to escape the frying city. For ten days, I barely went outside except to get in and out of the car, anxiously watching news of the siege as sweat-soaked reporters described the agony of the temperature. Fred rolled his eyes.
“Our boy Norm Nate is about to corner the market on albedo management, and once he starts, the governments of the world are going to have to keep paying him to put those nanoparticles into the sky for the next century, at least. Managing the temperature will become about as easy as you and I playing with a thermostat. As long as we don’t elect anyone dumb enough to interfere and strand good tech fixes—that’s the only thing that freaks me out, if an AOC or Aamanzaihou administration shuts down innovation. All this to say, we might be making a few campaign contributions to The Pastor next year.”
I laughed so hard the shrimp trembled off the tines of my fork and splashed into a puddle of yogurt.
“Fred! You’re not serious.”
“I might be.”
At the mention of his name, a familiar set of clashing emotions descended: the revulsion at his politics, the fear of his future candidacy since early polls had him well ahead in the Republican primary, and of course the secret I kept of our encounter, one which I now planned to take to my grave. It had grown difficult to see his face and not become flush with guilt and an uneasy revulsion. Years earlier I’d spent a weekend reading everything I could about him on the internet, trying to decide if his new shtick was all a ruse because that would have made him so much less frightening. Now I clicked, scrolled, or swiped away from the page if I saw his name in a headline.
“Fred. The guy is telling crowds that his blood can cure cancer.”
“Hey, maybe it can. We have some positions with biotech companies that are looking into it.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m just saying, you can’t overlook what he’s got in his favor, which is a commitment to deregulation, lower tax burdens, and aggressive energy policy.”
“So does Vic Love!”
“Yeah, and he gunned down hundreds of people in public. Then he turns around and pardons Pietrus and Kate Morris and all the rest.”
“Love did not pardon them,” I corrected. “The courts threw out the case against Pietrus.”
“But everyone knows he cut a deal to neuter the Senate investigation by dropping charges against Morris and all the occupiers—are you still defending her?”
We’d flown to London to escape the heat and close on our new place a few weeks before the government finally stormed the Mall. Everyone had known some kind of police action was coming, but when I saw the images of the rampage, I sat on the bed and began crying. When I heard the numbers of dead, I wept again, and vowed I would do something, but what do you do in that situation? Call your senator? Donate money to the ACLU? There wasn’t a meaningful outlet for my outrage or grief, so I did nothing while the media screamed back and forth at itself. A few months later we were at dinner with Peter O’Connell, his wife, Haniya, and two other couples, Tara clients. When the conversation turned to politics, one of the wives casually declared that what happened was “a shame, but Love did what he had to do to restore order.”
This woman did not know that Haniya’s brother had lost his husband there, and I didn’t blame her for losing her temper. “There’s an interview where you can watch the families of the people killed, and I suggest you take the time, you ignorant Nazi bitch.” She stood and left the restaurant. Peter went after her. Later, I was ashamed that I’d said nothing and remained for the rest of the meal so Fred could smooth things over.
When Fred and I spoke of it that night, he sounded as appalled and sorrowful as I felt. How did the country get to this place? He told me he would never vote or send a dollar in support of Love or any Democrat who stood by him ever again, but he was also furious at Kate Morris. “She led those people into that,” he said. “She used them. Sacrificed their lives for her lost cause.” A minority of Democrats screamed for impeachment but a deal was made. In exchange for concluding the investigation into the massacre, the government dropped all charges and released its prisoners, including most of those rounded up in the prior two years under PRIRA. The slaughter of over seven hundred American citizens in the capital was quickly scoured from the news by skyrocketing food prices, refugee flows from South America and the Caribbean, the Mars mission finally being declared lost, and The Pastor returning to the scene with more bombastic displays. The common refrain became “The country has to move forward.” Most of the Democrats we talked to repeated that almost as an incantation. A sign of the times that this seemingly history-making event could be swapped out in the news cycle in a matter of days.
