His breath was labored and shallow, his internal organs barely functioning, his blood flow had almost ceased, his heart was beating irregularly, like an afterthought.
He was moments from death and knew it.
Into the room came a feeling of dread, as if some livid part of the universe had been summoned and, regardless of who or what must be broken in the process, intended to establish that it, and not the other (merciful, loving) part reigned supreme.
Jill was still very much within me.
Not-Jill was still very much within me.
We were an inseparable unity, no longerwe,butI.
And resolved henceforth to think and act as one.
Present in my charge was a desire to confess something he’d previously been withholding.
Go ahead, I said.
Don’t hold me to this, he said. Spitballing.
Go, I said.
And he stopped speaking to me and began reasoning in my direction, as it were.
All right, look, what if he had? (he began).
Made some mistakes?
Let’s say (just say, for the sake of argument) that he’d been “wrong.” About certain things. Wrong in arguing against aview that now, more and more, seemed to have become, by some sort of public consensus, the prevailing/mainstream view. A view supported by the (yes, he could say it now) apparent increase (anecdotal, but still) in the frequency of certain extreme weather events, occurring so frequently recently that, before his illness, he’d gotten in the habit of turning off the news before the weather came on. The weather made him anxious. He felt blamed by it. Which was absurd, but. Then the weather had started bleeding over into the real news. So he’d stopped watching the news. Who needed it? Nothing new under the sun.
Who needed to see, for example, the filthy, storm-surging Mississippi flooding a kid’s birthday party, at which some photographer, intent on tugging heartstrings, had found (arranged,more likely) a cluster of pink birthday hats on a little tabletop floating away downriver? Not new. Well, all right, kind of new. But he didn’t need to see it. Or some African grandma in her scorched field of cassava or whatnot, toddling up to the camera with a dented cup, begging for something, anything. Or in France, a house absolutely zipping down a hillside through a gauntlet of still-standing houses, the street a sluice of sorts, the scale of the thing just amazing. In Peru, a drone flew over (and over and over) burned-out foundations of home after home, in the driveways of which sat smoldering cars, and between two of the cars stumbled a doe who’d caught fire, fur singed black, and then she dropped in a heap, braying plaintively from her unnervingly wide-open mouth. (Tough, tough to watch, nobody wanted to see that.) In Carmel, the Pacific swept this frail old fart right off his feet (tsunami, Japan) and when his equally frail wife went to help him, the ocean took her and her walker too, and you heard, on the video, someone say: Are they gone? And someone else said: Are they coming back? And a third person,possibly their adult son, started screaming bloody murder and the newscaster said, Could this, too, be considered climate-related?
Having a pretty good idea what the answer was going to be, he’d turned the goddamn set off.
It was all a sort of enviro-porn and he didn’t need it. It wasn’t scientific, it was conjectural, it implied specious connections between A and B. There were, yes, for sure, strange things happening, but to blame it all so simplistically on one specific cause, one particular—
Shitsake, you did your best. You staked out a certain position. That was how science worked. It was calledhaving a hypothesis.Having staked out that position, you defended it. What supported that position was “good,” what threatened it was “bad.” That was calledhuman nature.When you were in charge of a thing, you did your best to protect the interests of that thing. That was calledacting as a responsible corporate steward.
What had he done that was so goddamn terrible? (By “he” he meant “they,” the company of which he’d been in charge, with which he, by dint of years of unstinting, selfless toil, had become synonymous; in a sense, yes, hewasthe company, and so be it, that had always been a source of great pride for him.) Had he funded certain scientists? With whom he agreed? Whose views happened to align with his? To perform certain analyses and write scholarly articles summarizing the results? Guilty as charged. Had he (had they) promoted the resulting articles far and wide? Sure, you bet. He’d believed in the opinions expressed. Or had, at any rate, believed that getting those opinions out in the world did a certain kind of vital work, by way of offering a more well-rounded picture than was, at that time, being presented by the mainstream media, which tended to demonize, oversimplify—
(Speed it up, I said. Your time is short.)
Had he (had they) helped place those articles in prominent newspapers and whatnot? Had he (they) quoted from those favorable articles, in full-page ads that he paid for, in the larger papers of the day, and in glossy brochures widely distributed, somewhat omitting (often for reasons of space) the (some might say) tricky provenance of said articles/studies, as well as any mention of certainsimplifications/exaggerations/omissionsthat had possibly been made? He was proud to say that, in his role as its steward, yes, he’d always done his best to protect his organization from partial truths being lazily disseminated by non-disinterested parties that, left unchallenged, would have endangered the livelihood of thousands of good folks, not to mention the world’s critical supply of—
Look, hadn’t his enemies (also) cherry-picked, exaggerated, stretched the truth, worked the media, funded organizations friendly to their view?
He’d had the same exact information as everyone else. So why was he the fall guy? The central villain? The “single worst agent in the monumental and criminal effort to deny blah blah blah”?
And what was he supposed to do about it now anyway? At the hour of his death? Cut bait and run? Slink around to the other side of the table, where his enemies gloatingly sat, and cheerily call out: Hey, guess what, get this, you folks were right all along, I was wrong, I’m sorry?
“Oilman K. J. Boone Recants on Deathbed”?
No.
Not happening.
And anyway, if he did recant, who’d know?
You?
