“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?”