Jane Smiley - Golden Age

After the sale went through — to Piddinghoe Investments — they were given a month to depart. The new owners would be doing the fertilizing and the planting. Jesse was not to go into the fields for any reason.

—

HENRY COULD NOT help brooding on the loss of the farm, though he hadn’t been there in decades. It was surprising how sharp the images and sensations from his childhood were. He had to keep reminding himself that the house he was in when he closed his eyes no longer existed; the house Jesse and Jen were losing was the Frederick place, not the Langdon place. Even so, that sense of lying on his back on the sofa, holding his book (which in his mind was The Bride of Lammermoor ), seeing the sunlight cross the page in a triangle, moving the book, shading his eyes, thinking about his aching hip simultaneously with thinking about Edgar Ravenswood, who looks like Frank crossing the moor, and what is that, something like the back field. His mother is in the kitchen, talking to Claire and snapping beans for supper. He is planning his getaway. He turns his head and looks out the front window at the two leafy oak trees out there, and the rustling cornfield beyond. It is summer. The corn tassels are undulating in the breeze. He is idle, a pleasure.

He opened his eyes. Really, he was in his own chair, about eight feet from his bed. Through the doorway into the living room, he could hear Alexis playing the piano — she was practicing “Pictures at an Exhibition.” She was supposed to perform the whole thing in a recital at the end of May, and she had been practicing assiduously, which, it had to be said, drove Riley out of the house, but Henry didn’t mind — he liked the way the pattern of the notes was engraving itself on his brain. He did not think that Mussorgsky had intended his suite to be soothing, but Henry found it so.

The loss of the farm had been so quick that no one could believe it. Jesse had said nothing at Christmas, had seemed fine enough, considering the experience in Vancouver and Lois’s amazing end. He had complained only about the weather, but complaining about the weather was the friendliest complaint a person could make. Riley kept Henry fully informed about the blizzards in early January; Riley no longer talked about global warming or climate change, only “climate disruption.” Henry knew that she thought her career had been a failure, a beating of her head against the brick wall of capitalism. Often after she looked at Alexis, she looked away. How had she, of all people, invested in a future she knew would never happen? She even showed Henry an article on her phone that some archeologist had written about civilization collapse. The gist of it was that everything a civilization congratulated itself upon ended up precipitating collapse. Yes, Henry thought, Rome, Byzantium, Zapoteca.

Henry listened to the low throbbing accompanied by the melodious tune — da dah di da da da da; doo doo. Alexis was doing a mournfully good job with the music. Then the pounding chords of the next section; Henry didn’t remember what it was called. He imagined the Louvre, great halls of columns, marble, light, paintings. He imagined himself walking slowly from one painting to another. He wished he had bothered to go to St. Petersburg and visit the Hermitage. There were many things he had forgotten to do.

Now the tune started high and quickly deepened — the essence of being Russian, maybe. Who was that, Greg Stein, who had specialized in nineteenth-century Russian lit, lectured his students in a booming voice audible from the corridor, sounded and wrote as if he were six five and heavily bearded, but was actually five six and slight. Loved Gogol above all. He had quite a handshake, too. When Henry congratulated him on getting tenure, he had nearly broken Henry’s hand, his grip was so strong. Philly. He was from Philly.

People from cities hardly remembered the houses they grew up in. Greg Stein had kicked off the dust of Philadelphia and never looked back — Harvard was where he was born, at least in his own mind. Henry had tried that, but here it was. Every other memory was of the farm now. Walking to school at four with the adored Lillian, ten, wearing his mattress-ticking outfit, holding Lillian’s hand, looking up and closing his eyes, feeling her kiss him gently on the lips, hearing her say, “Don’t ask every question that you think of today, Henry. Just every other one.” Himself saying, “I promise.”

Now the finale, loud and a little discordant, drove all other thoughts out of his head. Bom bom bom bom bom. It was beautiful. Loud, then soft. Henry closed his eyes again.

A few minutes later, the Mussorgsky came to a measured end, and there was silence. He heard footsteps. He opened his eyes, and Alexis was standing in the doorway. Henry said, “Beautiful, darling. It’s almost there.”

“Maybe,” said Alexis. “Can I get you anything? I need to go through it one more time.”

“I’m fine,” said Henry. “I might get up today.”

Alexis smiled. She was so built like Charlie that he might as well have been in the room.

“Do it again, then we’ll see,” said Henry.

She turned, and disappeared.

He heard the bench scrape the floor; then there was a pause. A siren came and went in the distance. Henry shifted in his chair and licked his lips. He should have asked her to refill his water glass. He reached for the Kleenex, and the music began again, those simple notes at the beginning, then the chords, which always seemed so promising and patient, maybe the best opening measures of any music he knew of. That was when the pain came, a sharp but short pain. Henry writhed, clenched his fist, then relaxed, opened his mouth for a little air. The music swelled. Da da da da.

—

IF FELICITY AND EZRA had been getting along better, they might have uncovered who was behind Piddinghoe Investments more quickly, but every time they got together, at least in person (Felicity was not moving to D.C. and Ezra was not moving to Boston), they would argue, not about the election (they agreed that the election was a bald-faced power grab by the Corporatocracy), but about an organization called Deep Green Resistance. Ezra hadn’t joined DGR, and how did you join? There were no dues or meetings. But he was infected (Felicity’s word) by DGR’s manifesto, and the infection caused argument outbreaks. It also festered in Felicity’s brain, giving her migraine headaches. Even at Uncle Henry’s funeral, they’d had a vicious whispering argument in the living room, when Ezra pointed his finger at the light switch as if to shoot it. Felicity knew that her least developed talent was a sense of humor, but still could not help herself.

The theory propounded on the Deep Green Resistance Web site and in books by the DGR founders was that the only way to save a modicum of civilization was to systematically destroy the energy infrastructure right now, and maybe right now was too late; 2013 might not have been too late, but the world had dithered itself into four more years of climate collapse. Felicity’s problem with these ideas was that she could see the logic of them — if the world were forced to go local by the destruction of airports, roads, oil and gas pipelines, transmission towers, banks, harbors, the Internet, then, yes, there would be a war, or many wars, but the population would decrease, and the humans who were left would be forced to live the best they could in the environments they found themselves in. Abstractly, Felicity understood the necessity for population collapse of humans in order that other species might have the ghost of a chance, but she thought Ezra skated around the deaths of millions, and seemed to imagine that the items of infrastructure to be destroyed (including windfarms) would be manned only by jerks and assholes who deserved to die. Had there not been a day care in the building that the Oklahoma bombers blew up in ’95? Well, yes, said Ezra, but…And then he would spout the perfectly logical argument against non- or partial resistance put out by DGR: As energy supplies diminish and get dirtier, one society after another is going to be taken over by ruthless dictators, determined to preserve privilege. The entire world is going to turn into Haiti or Pakistan, and not only will more people die in the end, more overall destruction will be wrought, so that the planet will not be able to recover. The boil of civilization had to be lanced right now . Of course, Ezra didn’t even have a gun, much less a store of fertilizer, and he didn’t kill flies or spiders — he always wanted to see what they would do, so he followed them around his apartment and then opened a window and shooed them out. Felicity considered herself the cold one — the coldest one. Her first thought when her parents lost the farm was “About time.” Hadn’t she told her dad to switch to organics in 2013? The market was there, and the links between conventional farming, obesity, starvation, and habitat destruction were unequivocal. But how could he afford to take the land out of production for the three years it would take to clear out the chemicals (maybe more)? The farm bill didn’t pay for that.