Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

“You’re asking a lot of questions. Is this for your story?”

I consider this for a beat. He’s asking me if this is on the record or off the record. Do I want to know but not be able to report what I find? Or would I rather wait and find out by other means and be able to write what I discover? It’s the riddle of the non-disclosure agreement all over again.

“This is for me,” I finally say. Which feels dangerous. Like I just crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed—sliding from reporter to acquaintance. Maybe even friend. But I don’t see an oil magnate across from me right then; I don’t see the subject of any story. Just a man, a father, someone I’ve spent too much time around the past few days not to empathize with.

“I’m not an easy person to live with,” Ness tells me. “I try. Man, I try. I don’t want to be like my father, but we are who we are.” He shrugs. “I can’t sit still. I have so much I want to do, and I don’t feel like I have time for it all. I have a hard time delegating, an even harder time trusting people. Here’s the thing: Vicky cheated on me. Another parent she met at a PTA meeting. And when she left, I gave her everything she asked for, custody, the houses she wanted, the money she demanded, because I figured the affair was my fault for not being there. My fault for being a bad father.”

“Why do you think you’re a bad father?”

“Because it runs in the family.” Ness turns toward the window, where the moon bounces off the top of the clouds and lets in the faintest of ethereal glows. He’s little more than a silhouette, but I see him wipe his cheek. “Even my grandfather, who was a good man through and through, wasn’t a great father to my dad. I didn’t tell you the full truth about that the other day. It’s not that he was abusive, just absent. I think the same propensity to feel overwhelmed with guilt allowed him to let someone else raise his kid. Or maybe, like me, he was scared he’d screw it all up.”

“What is it you’re chasing?” I ask. “What’re you looking for?”

“Redemption,” Ness says. And the answer comes so fast, that I know he has asked himself this very question countless times. “I want to leave behind a better world than the one I was given. And like I told you the other day, I was given a world in a lot of pieces.”

“Your grandfather bought up shoreline and protected it to redeem himself. How will forging shells help anyone?”

Even in the dark, I can see Ness stiffen. I hate myself for saying it. I’m more curious about him than the stupid shells in that moment, but the conversation hemmed us in like a lee shore in a storm.

“Why does this no longer feel off the record?” Ness asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I lean forward and place a hand on his knee. “I really am. That wasn’t me being a reporter… just me being confused.”

“No, that’s okay.” Ness straightens himself in his seat, puts his laptop aside. I lean back in my own seat. “Of course they aren’t real,” he says. “The problem with those shells is that they’re too perfect. Maybe that’s why Arlov had to have them around. I don’t know.”

Before I can press him on this, Ness reminds me that we’re talking off the record. And then he flashes a mischievous smile brighter than the moon. “But if you want to get back on the record, I’ve got something you can print. A scoop just for you. Something I’ve never told another reporter.”

“What?” I ask.

“The story of my name.”

I try to hide my disappointment. “I know it,” I say. I can’t remember where I heard it, somewhere in all the hundreds of interviews and articles I’ve read about him. “Your middle name is Robert. Your father thought it would be cute, since you were born around the time he tried to make the company more green. What I’d much rather hear about—”

“No, the Wilderness thing? I don’t know who put that together, but it’s a coincidence. My grandfather on my mother’s side was named Robert. The real story is less interesting. Well, to most people, I imagine. But when my mother told me how I got my name, it led me on a trip where I discovered the single greatest thing she ever taught me about my father.”

I wait. And damn him, he has me curious.

“I was named after a monster,” Ness says.

“You were not,” I say. “You mean the loch?”

“Yes, precisely. Loch Ness. And my mom swears it’s the truth. The two of them spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Man, and they visited Scotland and the loch, and she said my father was taken with the lore of the place. But even more with the tourism. Have you ever been?”

“No.”

“I went. I wanted to find out what my father saw when he came up with this name. It seemed mysterious to me. It haunted me. All I had were a few hints from my mom, where they went, some things he said. So I went there by myself hoping to find out where I came from. Where I really came from, you know? Not my name, really, but to get to know my dad. And it hit me on my third day there. A woman in a cafe recognized me. You know what she did?”

“Ask for your autograph? Show you a shell from her collection?”

“She spit on me,” Ness says.

We fly along in silence.

“Why?” I finally ask.

“Oh, it wasn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s all the things you have planned for your story, I’m sure. My father rolling back the green initiatives when they ended up not being as profitable. All the oil exploration the company has done under my watch. Videos of flooded homes, of major cities underwater, the expense of the levees around New York, Miami, Boston. All the breakwalls going up around the world. Pick a reason.

“What was important for me was the timing of this incident. There I was, trying to find myself on the shore of my namesake, obsessing over this question of what my father saw in his unborn son. You see, I spent those days around the loch pretending to be my father. I tried to see the town through his eyes, tried to imagine I had a new wife whom I knew to be pregnant, and a future child that I knew was going to be a boy. I thought of what the place had been like back then, what my father might’ve seen, the world I was going to be born into.

“My father was taken with the lore of that place, but also the tourism. This was the hint I got from my mom. He told her that the people there hate what their community has become, but that they need it. They hate the signs everywhere, the glass boats on the water, the subs that take gawkers out on fruitless dives, the statues and the stuffed purple sea monster toys, but they can’t let go of it. They can’t stop. You see?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

“ We’re the monsters,” Ness says. “The Wildes. My father was a monster. His father and his grandfather were monsters. And he knew I’d become one too—”

At this, whatever holds Ness together, whatever keeps his emotions at bay, cracks. And he bends forward and weeps in his hands. Five or six shuddering sobs before he gets himself together. I am too stunned by the breakdown to react, to lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, to offer him a shoulder to cry on. It is the most unexpected thing I’ve seen from a man full of surprises.

Just as suddenly, he sits up, presses at his eyes with his fists, and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t apologize or seek anything from me, just continues his line of thought as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t seen this small fissure in his otherwise perfect shell.

“Everyone needs what we provide.” He swallows and composes himself further. “This plane? All the jets out there? The people who fly on them? They need us. They need the oil. It doesn’t matter if we get it with greener methods these days, doesn’t matter that we haven’t had a major spill in forty years, that we’re investing in alternate forms of energy. My great-grandfather did none of those things, because nobody cared back then. By the time his son was born, everyone had their fuzzy picture of who we were, the ugly legend. And the more they needed us, the more they hated us. It kept them from having to blame themselves.