T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Andrea ducks her head and lets her voice go soft. "They've got the mucosa on the East Coast. A new strain."

That hits me in the stomach, all right. Up comes Lori's face, bobbing to the surface, and then it's gone. Of course, I knew it-could have predicted it — and why not? If not the mucosa, then something else. "No vaccine?"

A shake of her newly minted head. "Not yet:'" So, then, why. Don't understand why you'd-?"

"Sit down, Ty," Andrea says, and April Wind is so wired I think she's going to rocket up off the dog-stinking couch, leap out the window and parachute to safety.

"I am sitting."

"Look, Ty, there's one more thing-"

I'm an old man. My teeth hurt, my knee hurts, my back — and there's a dull inchoate intimation of pain just starting to make its presence known deep in the intertwined muscles of my stitched-up forearm. I just gape at her.

"Maclovio Pulchris. We need him. His money, anyway. Earth Forever! Is going to fly again, in a big way. If this new mucosa strain is what we think it is, then the crash we've been talking about all these years is here, here right now." How did she get across the room so fast? Because here she is, right in my face, looming over me, Andrea, all of her, ready to put the screws to me all over again. "You hear me, Ty? Because you're coming with us."

No time fora a snappy comeback, no time to reflect on being used yet again, no time for volition or even protest. "I am?"

When I was younger-young, that is-everybody I knew was alive. Now pretty much everybody I know, or knew, is dead, and the odd thing is that none of them died a natural death-He expired in his sleep, never knew what hit him, that sort of thing. Uncle Sol was the exception, though his death seemed unnatural too, in the way that all death seems unnatural — I was a teenager then, working with him on his safari ranch in San Diego, both of us up to our elbows in urine-drenched straw and the exotic shit of exotic beasts, and as I say, he was leaning over the bulbul cages one morning and felt the jab of mortality up under his rib cage. Tell me, is that natural? I've had friends succumb to cancer, and Lori-Lori died in my arms, both of us wearing gauze masks, the mucosa so thick in her lungs and throat she couldn't draw a breath, tracheotomy or no, and that's natural, nothing more natural than the disease we spread in our sticky, promiscuous way. But what about my parents, my wife, my daughter, what about Teo? They say that if all disease was cured (and what a joke that fond promise has turned out to be) people wouldn't get much past the age of ninety or so anyway, what with the chances of accident. Actuarial tables? Take it to Las Vegas.

Accident rules the universe, I know that, and there's no escaping it, science or no. But accident gives rise to the concept of luck — and if you believe in luck, you might as well break out your juju beads and get your mojo working, you might as well borrow a totem from April Wind and go out and talk to the trees. Go ahead and pray to the gods, pray to God and Jehovah, pray to Newton and Kepler and Oppenheimer. See what good it does you.

My mother, Bernadette O'Shaughnessy, believed in the mystery with a divine face, believed in heaven, spirits, angels on high. She was the one who sat me in a pew in the hushed, candlelit vaults of the Church of the Assumption in PetersIdll, New York, when I was so small I couldn't see over the rail. Every Sunday morning imploded on the sleepy, dreary, mind-numbing ritual that was mass, nothing left of it now but a welter of reworked sensory impressions misfiring in my septuagenarian brain: my mother's gloved hand like silk in my own, the power of her perfume to drive back the narcotic musk of the incense, the icy dip of the holy water-icy even in summer — and the music of the organ like some exotic feast that fills you to bursting with something that isn't food at all. I attended religious instructions. I was conversant with nuns and priests. I was eight, ten, twelve years old, I was communed and confirmed, bore the mystery of Latin, knew that masturbation was a sin and that God was watching. It was He who created the universe, the gnat-catcher, the canyon wren, the brown hyena and all those fifty-four billion galaxies, and He who created me and created Santa Claus and his elves too and the mountain of foil-wrapped gifts under the tree.

Yeah, sure. And then came science.

Science-empiricism, skepticism, the spirit of inquiry, doubt, debate and outright derision-was a gift of my Jewish father, Seymour Tierwater, the man everyone called Sy (Get it? Sy and 7. 51?) A nd I called Daddy. He was an MP during the war, a man who cracked heads as casually as he cracked walnuts, an angry man, a big man. He drank vodka. My mother drank scotch. With the backing of my mother's father, a roaring, barking, rock-headed, neo-Cretaceous presence looming large in the dining room and den of my early years, Seymour Tierwater took his brand — new architectural degree from City College and built the development I grew up in. And how did you build a housing development? With divine help and guidance? With incense and magic? With elves? No. You built it with orthogonal angles and real things, concrete things, things made and scavenged by man out of a harsh, alien and godless universe that existed because it existed, and for no other discernible reason.

My father and I never had discussions along the lines of "If God is so good and wise and all-knowing and all-powerful, then why did He create ticks and tapeworms and let all the Jews die in the ovens?" For him, there was no god but science, and never had been. But there must have been an ironclad quid pro quo in my parents' marriage contract-. My grandfather's money, my grandfather's religion-because my father never objected to my early indoctrination, or not that I knew of, anyway. He just bided his time, a look of bemusement or mockery on his face whenever the sacerdotal words-Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Spirit-dropped from his son's lips. Was this a happy marriage? No. Not after the first ten years, anyway, but it lasted, held together by a king-size bed and ice cubes in a glass, till a crane buckled and a beam gave way and I became an orphan at the age of twenty-seven.

I mention all this because it gives me a context for evaluating what Andrea's just told me. If I'm getting it straight, it's this: the world is ending, so we have to write The Lives of the Environmental Saints and fleece Maclovio Pulchris so that we can run off and hide till such time as we can use the booty to rebuild it again. The world, that is.

"You're coming with us: 'she repeats.

"I'm going nowhere. Or scratch that-I'm going to the bathroom. Sake in the morning, you know what 1 mean?" A look for April Wind. "And you must know, right, April? You're getting to that age now, aren't you? Just wait," I tell them, tell them both, and I'm so worked up I can hear the blood singing in my ears, "just wait till you get to be my age."

And then I'm ducking around the eternally overspilling buckets, my shoes sloshing on the sodden carpet, the pyrotechnics in my bowels a direct consequence of being seventy-five years old and foolish enough to think you can imbibe sake at ten o 'clock in the morning and get away with it. Cheap sake, at that. My need is urgent, but still I can't help stopping at the bathroom door to turn a withering look on my ex-wife and current bed-partner. "Did you really say `Earth Forever! Is going to fly again'? Am 1 hearing right? `Fly again '? I mean, how deluded can you get?" Oh, yes, and now I'm full of it, full of myself and gas pains too. "If it ever flew, and don't tell me it ever really did, not in any waythat mattered to anybody except maybe Sierra and a bunch of disaffected lunatics and bush-beaters, then I'm sorry it did, heartily sorry, and I wish I'd been there to cut the wings off of it with a rusty pair of scissors. Or shears. Carpet shears. And a bag of salt to rub, in the wounds.