Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“A Quechua wife would feed her groom maca on the eve of battle, ensuring that her man would return from the front lines triumphant and unscathed, to greet a bride proudly pregnant with his warrior son,” Paddock explained in voice-over as his silhouette jogged into the sunset.

“He’s just old-school man’s man’s man, you know?” Karina asked Jen. “The surfer as hunter-gatherer, board over one shoulder and a clean-shot wildebeest over the other.”

“This is really exciting,” Jen said, “but didn’t Leora say recently that she wanted to stick with an all-female board?”

“Quite the contrary,” Karina said, biting her lip flirtatiously. “Leora has been saying that she wants more men, plural, on the board, to send the message that women’s issues are everybody’s issues. You know, that word integration —she said it was important to her, and Leora doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean.”

“Wow, cool-guy casting alert,” Jen said, nodding emphatically.

“For every single nourishment that we choose to put inside our body,” Paddock intoned to the camera in another promotional video, standing alongside a startled-looking Bolivian farmer whose shoulder tensed in Paddock’s manful grip, “you have to ask yourself one question: What are the medicinals? ” Then the camera cut to Paddock at an unidentified farmers’ market, in a different country and a different shade of tight-fitting T-shirt, peering up from a close inspection of a batch of yacón roots to tell the camera: “BodMod answers that question. Think of it as Superfoods, Simplified.”

“It’s all natural, totally pure, untouched by anything but the hand of God,” Karina said. “What this dude is doing, it’s like fair trade on steroids. No, what am I saying — it’s like fair trade on medicinal cacao and sacha inchi !”

“Right, because steroids aren’t natural,” Jen said. “I mean, they are natural in that they’re organic compounds, but anabolic steroids are kind of definitively unnatural…”

“You’re exactly right,” Karina said, staring into space.

Paddock’s plan in Belize, Karina explained, was to research and develop a line of herbal teas derived from the nation’s diverse ecosystem, particularly its trees: the bark of the bay cedar (“to aid digestion”) and the Billy Webb (“to boost immunity”) and the copal (“to restore the body’s pH balance”), the pulp of the calabash tree (“to increase the red blood cell count”), the leaves of the Senna alata (“to detoxify the liver and kidneys”), and the seed pods of the stinking toe tree (“to relieve fatigue and the symptoms of diabetes”).

“Can you imagine?” Karina asked Jen. “You’ve got this guy who looks like a Norse god, who does the Nevada Silverman every year and plays water polo with weights on his ankles just to spice things up, and he’s going to market a line of herbal teas ? It’s just so wild!”

“Totally,” Jen said. “Well, I am so grateful for this opportunity, and really psyched that you asked me along. I’ve never been to Belize — I don’t even know much about it. My husband will be so jealous.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you before — what does your husband do?” Karina asked, resting her elbow on her desk and her chin on her fist and squinting, as if about to squeeze all of her powers of attention into an orange juice — like concentrate composed solely of binary data on Jen’s husband’s occupation.

“He teaches fifth grade in a public school in Flatbush,” Jen said.

Karina shimmed her chin back and forth atop her fist in wonderment. “That’s God’s work right there,” she said. “You’ve got a keeper. And where’s he from, what about his parents?”

“He’s from Erie, Pennsylvania; only child,” Jen said. “His mom was a waitress. She died a few years ago. Cancer.”

Karina furrowed her brow and mashed her lips together. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, she was awesome,” Jen said. “And — and what about your husband, Karina?”

“He’s in advertising,” Karina said, rolling her eyes and flopping backward against her chair. “Raw deal.”

“Oh! Why is that a raw deal?” Jen asked.

“When people have less money to spend, the first thing they spend less money on is advertising. Been a tough time for him. I feel for the guy.”

Jen tried to imagine a scenario in which she would say “I feel for the guy” in regard to Jim, and then refocused. “Oh, no, Karina, did he — well, it’s none of my business, but was he affected by the financial apocalypse?”

Karina tossed her head and laughed. “Oh, man, the apocalypse, ” she said. “I’ll have to remember that. That’s a good one. He’s fine. He didn’t lose his job, if that’s what you’re trying to ask me, although sometimes I think that would have been the softer blow. But he did have to be part of a lot of tough decisions about cost-cutting, restructuring staff, the usual brutal calculus of keeping the lights on when there’s a storm outside lashing your power lines.” Karina sighed. “Whatever. He’s obviously not dashing around the foothills of the Andes trying to save the world, one exotic herb at a time. Anyway. What else?”

“So, what is our agenda for the trip?” Jen asked. “Other than hanging out with this awesome guy, which is agenda enough, obviously!”

“Ha, agenda —that is such a Jen question, such a Jen word, ” Karina said. “I love it. I do. I love you! But to be honest, we’re off to a subtropical paradise with a board member who’s sourcing foods that can cure everything from procrastination to cancer, and he’s helping entire communities of subsistence farmers while he does it. Really, how much of an agenda do we need?”

“Sure, sure,” Jen said. “And so, many of these subsistence farmers are — women?”

“Yes, of course,” Karina said. “It’s a real by-women-for-women kind of deal. For a project affiliated with LIFt, I think that goes without saying.”

“Travis Paddock’s eye-watering macho masculine manliness notwithstanding,” Jen said, and cushion-laughed.

“I don’t follow,” Karina said.

“Just so I understand,” Jen said, “we’re tagging along on one of his research trips, right? And I’m guessing that we could meet with some local farmers or collectives — women farmers, women’s collectives — that could benefit from a LIFt grant? Is that the general idea? And my role — the communications role here would be — documentation? Photos, interviews…”

“Mmm,” Karina said.

“And so, this might sound like a weird question, but is there a way in which this becomes a kind of promotional opportunity for Travis’s company — it’s called BodMod, right?” Jen asked.

“Promotional opportunity, huh. I mean, if you want to be cynical about it, sure, you can put it that way,” Karina said, twisting her mouth into a constipated smile. “If that’s your agenda. ”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Jen said, resisting the urge to cushion-laugh again. “Like I said, I think you’ve just been in deeper with this project, and I’m clumsily trying to catch up!”

“Catch up when you land in Belize,” Karina said, swiveling her body toward her computer and laying her fingers on her keyboard while keeping her eyes locked with Jen’s, her head poised at a 90-degree angle from the rest of her body. “Be in the moment and just open yourself up to the journey. Who knows what we’ll discover there, right?”

“I just — I know you’re busy, I just want to make sure that there isn’t anything we need to keep in mind in terms of — of any kind of collaboration we’re making between LIFt as a charitable entity and BodMod as a for-profit business.”