“Anyway, they figured since I was American I must play softball, and they got me out to play catch with them, and now I’m not only on a team but have been appointed head umpire for the season, because they were having trouble with their umpires taking sides. It’s the last thing I would have expected when I came. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I mean you can go to the El Toro mela every summer, so why not softball over here? Everything everywhere, that’s what it’s coming to.
“Well, I’m going to get off, this is costing me fun times in Dakka. There aren’t any phones like this in Atgaon—the hospital has a recorder but no transmitter, so I’ll try to make some letters there, and send them when I can. Meanwhile you can send letters like this to me in Dakka, and I’ll get to play them eventually. I hope you will, it’s not as good as really talking but it’s better than nothing. Say hi to everyone there, I love you.”
The image flickered out.
Kevin sat in his dark room, staring at static on the screen. He could hear Tomas in the next room, tapping away at his computer’s keyboard. He could go and talk to Tomas, who would take a break for something like that. Or he could go down to the kitchen, Donna and Cindy would be down there soaking it up and talking to people on TV. Or Sylvia and Sam. Friends were the real family, after all. Family were not actually family until they were friends too. And yet, and yet… his sister. Jill Claiborne. He wanted to talk to his sister.
5
May. Hard buds on the branches, vibrant green in the rain. Barely a day’s sun all April. I can’t remember.
Pam came home last night tired and footsore after running two experiments at once. She thinks she can finish the lab work early and do the writing up in the States. Shorten separation. So she’s in Pamela Overdrive. I made dinner and she threw the paper down in disgust, told me about her day. “The probe compound and internal standards diffused out of the water sample into the headspace until an equilibrium between the liquid and gas phases was reached.”
“Uh huh.”
“And that depends on the water solubility and the volatility of the two compounds.”
As she went on I stared at her. What Chemists Say To Spouses/What Spouses Understand. Blah blah blah, Tom, blah blah blah.
She saw the doggie look on my face, smiled. “So how’d the book go?”
“The same.” It’s not fair, really. I can’t understand a word she says when she talks of her work, while for me, on this project at least, she is a crucial sounding board. “I’m thinking of alternating chapters of fiction with essay chapters which discuss the political and economic problems we need to solve.”
“My God.” Wrinkled nose, as if something gone bad in fridge.
“Hey, H.G. Wells did it.”
“Which book?”
“Well—one of the major utopian novels.”
“Still in print?”
“No.”
“Libraries have it?”
“University libraries.”
“So Wells’s science fiction adventures are still in every library and bookstore, while this major utopia with the essays is long gone, and you can’t even remember the title?”
I changed the subject.
Think I might pass on the essays.
Six months, four months. Three months? Go quickly, mysterious experiments. Go well. Please.
Kevin woke from a dream in which a huge bird was standing on the limpid water of a rapid stream, wings outstretched as it spun on the clear surface, keeping a precarious balance. Foggily he shook his head, grinned at himself. “Sally Tallhawk,” he said, rolling out the syllables. The strategies she had listed while wandering around her sublime campsite filled his thoughts, and feeling charged with energy he decided to visit Jean Aureliano before work and confer.
Jean’s office was on the saddle between Orange Hill and Chapman Hill. Kevin blasted up the trail in fifth gear and skidded into her little terrace. Her office was a low set of rooms built around a tiny central stone garden, with open walls and pagoda corners on the low roof. Kevin had done some work on it. When he walked into her office she looked up from the phone and smiled at him, gestured at him to take a seat. Instead he wandered around looking at the prints on the walls, Chinese landscape paintings in the Ming dynasty style, gold on green and blue. Jean spoke sharply, arguing with someone. She had iron gray hair, cut short in a cap over a solid, handsome head. Big-boned and heavyset, she moved like a dancer and had a black belt in karate. For many years now she had been the most powerful person in El Modena, and one of the most powerful in Orange County, and she still looked it. The smoldering glare of the Hispanic matriarch was currently fixed on whoever was on the other end of the line, and Kevin, glancing at her quickly, was glad it wasn’t him.
“Damn it,” she said, interrupting a tinny whine coming over the phone, “the whole Green alliance is breaking up on the shoals of extremists like you, we’re in the modern world now—no, no, don’t give me that, there’s no going back, all this talk of watershed sovereignty is so much nostalgia, it’s no wonder there’s shrieks of protest from all sides! You’re tearing the party apart and losing us the mandate we’ve had! Politics is the art of the possible, Damaso, and if you set impossible goals then what kind of politician are you? It’s stupid. What?… No. Wrong. Marx can be split into two parts, the historian and the prophet. As a historian he was great and we use his paradigm every day, I don’t contest that, but as a prophet he was wrong from the start! By now anyone who calls themselves a Marxist in that sense has elote for brains…. Damaso, I can’t believe you sometimes. Los pobres, come on, you think you help them with this balkanization?—Chinga yourself!” And then a long string of sulphurous Spanish.
Angrily she hit the phone, cutting off the connection. “What do you want?” she said to Kevin without looking up.
Nervously Kevin told her.
“Yes,” she said. “Alfredo’s great plan. From the crown of creation to the crown of the town. I’ve been keeping track of it and I think you and Doris are doing a good job.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said, “but we’ve been trying to do more. We talked to a water lawyer from UC Bishop—”
“Tallhawk?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yeah, she’s a good one. What did she say?”
“Well, she said we were unlikely to stop this development on the water issue alone.”
Jean nodded. “But we’ve got resolution two-oh-two-two to hang onto, there.”
“Yeah. But she gave us some suggestions for other avenues to take, and one of them was to use the various requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. Oscar said you would know about that and how it was going—you could ask to see their EIS when it comes in.”
“Yeah that’s right, we’ll do that. The problem is that they’ll probably be able to minimize the environmental impact on that little hill, it barely touches Santiago Park, and with all the other hills already built up—” She made a quick gesture at her office.
“Wouldn’t that be a point in our favor?”
“More likely a precedent. But we’ll do what we can about it.”
“Oscar said that if you mobilized the party machinery to fight the proposal…”