“She’s coming to New Haven next weekend when you’ll be here.”
Her eyes exploded in incredulity, twin flashes of eyebrow and flared nostrils that made him think the lenses of her glasses might crack. “How?”
“I bought her a ticket.”
She blasted air through her lips. “Great incentive system, Dad. She drops out, you buy her a cross-country flight.”
“You’ve made your point,” he said, hitting the note of gentle sternness that Holly sometimes needed to end the conversation. “The three of us haven’t all been together since the summer. It’ll be good.”
Holly was only two and a half hours by train to New York, so they saw each other frequently. They’d pick a museum or a sightseeing activity, get lunch, and spend the afternoon together. He flew to California once every three months to see Catherine. During the summer the three of them often visited Corey’s place in Florida, and though the guy’s entire engagement with reality consisted of memorizing Fox talking points, Corey had made considerable effort to stay in the girls’ lives after Gail passed. Begrudgingly, Tony did want to honor that.
Holly looked off-screen and said, “Hey. Yeah. Talking to my dad. He’s at the Burning Man for billionaires. Say hi.”
Dean’s grinning, mop-topped head edged in from the right side of the frame. “Tony! How’s it going? Here, make room, babe—” He brought a stool swiveling around and perched beside Holly, who scooted left. “I was telling my friends you were at Davos, and they were asking me if you were an international playboy or something. How is it? Is it so cool? Who’ve you glad-handed with?”
“Glad-handing’s not so much my thing. Not sure if you could tell.”
Dean laughed far too hard. When Holly first introduced Dean, Tony thought the guy was mocking him, but it turned out, no, that was just Dean, an eager beaver. He was a slender Korean kid with a wispy hipster mustache that made him look like he’d just figured out puberty. Tony was certain he’d never like any of the idiots his daughters dated, but Dean wasn’t so bad. The first time Holly brought him to dinner, he excitedly debriefed Tony, with genuine interest, about ice sheet flow rates. For whatever reason, the kid could not get enough of Tony, and this seemed to make Holly happy. Dean injected new flavor.
“We’re going to watch your panel tomorrow, Dad. You can livestream all of them on Slapdish.”
“People sit in virtual reality to watch Davos panels?”
“Tony, man, people sit in VR to watch flies land on countertops,” Dean said. “Now you gotta give these people all the shit, man. Who else is on your panel?”
“Randall,” said Holly.
“Randall? Like Mary Randall!” His eyebrows shot up as he looked between Holly and the laptop camera. “Tony, she could be president.”
“She’s not going to be president,” said Holly. “She won’t even get the nomination.”
“No,” Dean clapped his hands, “I read this thing about how the RNC is changing all the nominating rules in Iowa and New Hampshire to avoid getting themselves another lunatic Twitter-troll game-show host! They’re clearing the way for her. Tony—holy hell—get her autograph, man.”
“I thought you wanted me to give her shit?”
“Yeah! Get her autograph then give her shit! That’ll be badass.”
He stayed on the line for another hour talking to Holly and Dean. When he closed his laptop, he had that feeling he got when he’d had a particularly good conversation with one of his daughters. Satisfaction colliding with melancholy. Missing them.
He put his shoes and jacket back on and went down to the lobby, where he bought a pack of cigarettes with a gruesome picture of gum cancer. He’d picked up the habit in undergrad and had been a pack a day chain-smoker through grad school and his PhD when the nicotine let him burn through work, feverish. At Gail’s insistence, he’d given it up when Holly was born, and other than the errant loosy here and there, remained quit of it until he moved back to Connecticut. When Catherine didn’t follow him to New Haven, he’d bought his first pack in over twenty years.
Davos Klosters was the perfect place for a smoke. He stood outside the hotel and took a drag. The temperature had dropped to a properly frigid position on the thermostat, and the day’s slush had frozen solid. Trucks went by spewing sand and salt on the steel-hard ice. The smoke warmed his lungs. The lights of the city glowed gold, and the air had streaks of pale blue and purple lingering from the fallen sun. Beyond the city, he could see the outlines of the mountains. Dark and slumbering behemoths.
As one of the emissaries of Davos guided him to his seat on the stage, his dream from the previous night was still fresh. He’d been swimming or on a boat—somehow in the ocean—trying to navigate a storm overhead that looked like a dark gray city turned upside down in the sky, monolithic, with jets of black billowing from the edges. Multiple tornadoes descended and whipsawed in the surf. Red lightning flickered across the horizon, and descending from this cloud, like alien spacecraft, were deep-sea drilling rigs. They crashed into the water in a perfect row, impossibly immense, city-sized themselves, and as they fixed into place, they got to work. The tubes siphoned a briny liquid from the depths, and in that liquid were naked bodies, one after another. The machinery hummed until he had to cover his ears.
Not too difficult to interpret that one, at least.
He would share the stage with the former head of the World Bank, a Japanese American banking mogul with a bad comb-over; the Nigerian finance minister, a large woman in brightly colored African dress who would supposedly represent the developing world in the conversation; the spokeswoman for a laughable organization of fossil-fuel players called the Sustainable Future Coalition, which claimed it wanted to see action on climate; and finally, the New York governor herself. Randall had hooded, sleepy eyes that nevertheless crackled with confidence and cunning. She was attractive, like a gracefully aging movie star, and her hair was styled smooth with bangs nearly falling into her eyes. The political-gossip rags all loved talking about her hair, and maybe it was his imagination, but the room did feel whispery and electric with her presence. Here she was, the Republican Party’s resurrection, its woke rebirth after a decade of Trumpism.
The stage was what he imagined one of those old single-camera sitcom sets would be like. They sat in a semicircle in front of a wall with repeating logos for the World Economic Forum. He clutched six note cards he’d never look at. This had been Gail’s suggestion about his public-speaking skills. “You need something to do with your hands. You’re fidgety,” she’d chided. Had she lived to see the publication of his book, he doubted she would have seen much improvement.
The lights bore down so the audience was nothing but indistinct shadows, but he could feel perspiration struggling free on his brow. He sipped the glass of water on the table beside him, from which the wire microphone sprouted. The moderator, an unsettlingly young, pretty British journalist whose name he immediately spaced on, began by introducing their panel on the climate crisis and the transition to a zero-emissions economy. Of course, she had to tally the carnage first.
“The typhoon that devastated the southern coast of South Korea this past year,” the reporter began. “The persistent droughts in Australia, the Middle East, Pakistan, South Africa, and the American Southwest—some of which have required major investment in emissions-heavy desalinization efforts, the flooding last spring that inundated parts of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. We have the paradoxical effect of a warming Arctic creating more intense blizzards in northern latitudes. The so-called Come to Jesus Storm a little over a year ago was only the latest example, breaking every regional snowfall record in Canada and the United States while killing nearly a hundred people. These increasingly destructive events are becoming more frequent, more expensive, and more deadly. We are deep into the new normal and our panel will discuss how we navigate a changing global climate.”