Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

The oncologist chewed on his inside cheek. This office must have seen its fair share of impotent fury. “Maybe I should have asked before. What do you do for a living, Mr Knacker?”

“I run – I work for a company that does household repairs. We send out handymen, basically. Provide the materials …”

The eyes of the physician sharpened. “Do you, or have you done, any of this kind of work yourself?”

Handyman sounded down-market – it had always had a low-class ring to his father, and Jackson had invented all sorts of clunky euphemisms to avoid using the word – but Shep refused to regard the occupation as shameful. If Glynis, too, preferred to describe his more executive capacity at dinner parties, he saw nothing ignoble about physical labor. He was more likely to find ignoble lolling for years at a desk. “Sure, of course.”

“And would you have worked with insulation, or cement products … fireproofing, soundproofing, roofing materials … gutters, rainwater pipes … vinyl flooring, plaster … water tanks?”

Shep felt a flicker of wariness, an intuition that this was the point at which savvy criminals in police interviews took the fifth. The innocent, by contrast, believed that they had nothing to hide, and idiotically blabbed their hearts out. Little wonder that innocent had two connotations: without sin, and ignorant. “All of the above, at one time or another. Why? I never took Glynis out on the job. If any of those materials had asbestos in them, wouldn’t I be the one who got sick?”

“You might have brought fibers home on your clothes. In fact, I came across a story recently about a woman with mesothelioma in Britain, who’s suing their Ministry of Defence. Her father was an insulation engineer at a naval dockyard, and she’s certain that she was exposed to asbestos from hugging her father as a child.”

As a grown man, Shep rarely blushed, but now his cheeks stung. “That seems far-fetched.”

“Mmm,” said Dr Knox. “A single fiber, on the hand, touched to the mouth? Unfortunate, but not far-fetched.”

The wave of heat was followed by a wave of cold, as Glynis turned to him and her expression was accusatory. First he’s so caught up in his “own little world” that his wife doesn’t confide that she’s being tested for a deadly disease, and now he gave it to her.

Shep finally broke their silence as he unlocked the car in the parking garage on Ft Washington. “I thought asbestos was banned a long time ago.”

“It’s still not banned,” said Glynis, bundling furiously into the passenger seat. “The EPA finally banned the shit in 1989, but in 1991 the industry got the ban overturned in court. You can’t use it in insulation and some other whathaveyou anymore, that’s all, or building anything new.”

Shep was immediately struck by the homework Glynis had done on this subject – there was no way that this regulatory timeline had been long lodged in her head as general knowledge – when she had conspicuously refrained from availing herself of the copious information at her fingertips about her illness. She was hazy on the side effects of drugs whose names and downsides were meticulously listed on a host of websites; she would not scroll down . Yet her searches on their home computer had apparently regarded not what was happening to her or what would happen to her next, but who was to blame. The misdirection of her energies was painfully typical.

“I’m not quite sure how I could have known.” He didn’t start the car, though he stared intently out the windshield as if he were driving. “The materials I used to work with were the same ones everyone used. Licensed plumbers, professional roofers … I never cut corners, or used a material that I knew other repairmen were careful to avoid.”

“You could easily have known, and you should have! Evidence about the dangers of asbestos goes back to 1918 . The evidence was really beginning to accumulate by the 1930s, but the industry had the research suppressed. The specific link between asbestos and mesothelioma was made in 1964. That was before you even started Knack! By the 1970s, that asbestos could kill you was basically a known fact. I grew up surrounded by these stories, and so did you!”

“Glynis, try to think back,” said Shep, keeping his voice calm, reasoning, quiet. “During the early years I was putting in twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour days getting Knack off the ground. I didn’t have time to read the papers front to back. Much less to bury my nose in a microscopic list of ingredients every time I opened a can.”

“We’re not talking about your not having time to follow every twist and turn of peace talks in the Middle East. You had an obligation to keep up with health and safety issues that bore directly on your work. And to do whatever modest research might have been required to choose safe products over lethal ones. Never mind just you – or, by the way, your wife and children. What about your employees?”

“I no longer have employees,” he said quietly. “Glynis, why are you doing this? Are you getting back at me for Pemba?”

She was not to be sidetracked. “All these companies being sued up the wazoo for decades right and left, but no, you stick your head in the sand and totally ignore it!”

Shep himself had never been a man for causes. It was his nature to see two sides of things; worse, many sides, so that acquaintances often mistook him for having no opinions at all. He was attuned to particularities, complexities, and extenuating circumstances. He wasn’t critical of ideologues; he found Jackson entertaining. There were causes whose proponents had prevailed and improved matters. He was glad that his wife could vote, and that blacks no longer had to use separate water fountains. It was clearly a fine thing, too, that some firebrands had demonized asbestos, so that his own co-workers were no longer replacing insulation that could kill them, and wouldn’t risk being cast in this terrible role of contaminant by their own wives.

Nonetheless, he had also founded a company, and had a better-than-average understanding of what a company was: neither ogre nor abstraction. It was an amalgam of many people – including the odd slipshod employee or ruthlessly bottom-line zealot who could single-handedly undermine decades of collective diligence. It was an intersection of many products, each of which was connected to yet another company, also of many people, decent people who didn’t always feel like going to work every morning and still did, and each with its host of obligations – to stockholders, investors, health plans, and pensions. Yet a company was also an entity that somebody loved. Not that he was excusing poor practice, but corporate malfeasance was therefore both diffuse, and deeply personal. Given the diffusion, he couldn’t see the satisfaction in pointing the finger at “a company,” much less at “an industry.” After all, look at Glynis. In preference to railing at “an industry,” she was clearly far more gratified to locate a guilty party whom she could literally get her hands on.

He wondered if Edward Knox had any idea how anguishing was his suggestion that Glynis would have come by her cancer as the result of an embrace.

Yet if it helped her, if she hungered to tell herself a story, acquiescing to the part of villain was a service Shep could perform. Maybe it was a modest service, although it didn’t feel modest.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea asbestos was so deadly. Or that it was in all those materials your doctor mentioned. But you’re right, I should have read those articles. Before working with any product, I should have made certain what it contained. I was irresponsible.” He choked a little on that last adjective, never in his life one applied to him, by himself or anyone else. “And now you’re the one who has to pay for that. It’s not fair. I should be the one who’s sick. I wish it was me. I wish I could shoulder it for you.”