“This would’ve happened anyway,” I said. “Nothing would’ve changed this.”
She touched the image on the front page—a screaming little girl being carried by a fireman. “I know that,” she said. “But for the rest of my life, I’ll see things like this and remember how we failed.”
We left Lone Pine that day as the fire spread: twenty-thousand acres and still uncontained. Kate barely spoke as we hurtled north. I had no idea then what dreams she was hiding, what burdens she was safekeeping. She kept her eyes on a mountain range and above it, the vivid blue ether. I held her hand and wished we had met in another time, someplace far away from this endless fear and grieving.
E
L
D
EMONIO
2031
If he believed in omens, Tony might have paid more attention to his dreams. In the most disturbing one, he was pinned to a desert floor while screaming winds of silt and sand scoured him away. Paralyzed, as the sand removed his flesh grain by grain, he could feel the bones of his knuckles and cheeks exposed to the blasting air. Then there was a form in the wind-borne sand, a banshee smothering his bleeding limbs, smuggling her shriek into his mouth. He awoke in his hotel overlooking the Atlantic soaked in sweat. Through the window, the moon reflected orange off the ocean’s horizon.
The next day the protestors were a cloud of flies on a carcass. He’d come to Miami at the invitation of the mayor to discuss the city’s battle with the ocean, but wherever he traveled now, protests followed. They carried the typical signs proclaiming him a liar, a traitor, a cancer, part of the Jewish-media climate conspiracy. “Where do you get your money!” they shouted. Counterprotesting climate activists held Fierce Blue Fire placards and cardboard painted like tombstones with the markings of a domino, in reference to his theory; a few young women held signs that read PIETRUS CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, and they began chanting, greatly confusing their neo-Nazi bedfellows as to whose side they were on. After calling out the future president on her shell game at Davos, his publisher dropped him and Yale guided him into retirement. Now he mostly collected “consultant” fees by bringing city governments news they abjectly did not want to hear (nor do anything about). As was the case with the mayor’s team, some of whom even nodded off during his presentation on saltwater upwelling.
“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?”