Nebraska. It grows out of the ground. We kill the ground, and it won’t grow. We won’t be able to eat.”
McCaffrey nodded. “That’s the other problem—no one is thinking about this in the long term. We’re selling our resources to the highest bidders, and in twenty years, we’ll look back and slap our foreheads at the idiocy of something like that—look at South Africa and Iraq, for God’s sake—but right now, because we see no serious consequences to our actions, or maybe because we’ve somehow lost our own survival instincts, we keep doing it.”
McCaffrey looked directly into the camera when he said this. “We want to compete with the big guns like China. But they say in another ten years, the annual death toll in China from smog will reach three million. And the thing is, what they breathe, we breathe. The world spins, you know? Why can’t anybody ever recognize that the world spins?”
A shiver ran down Saraub’s spine, and he shut the laptop. The footage was good. No doubt. Which in its way amplified his heartbreak. His movie was dead. He couldn’t do this all over again. He was thirty-five years old, single, a slob. Nothing to show for his hard work except a dirty studio apartment. He sighed. For the first time in his life, the turkeys had him down.
Next to him, Wilson finally spoke. His voice was ragged with fury, and Saraub noticed that his eyes weren’t quite focused. The left pupil lazed farther toward his brow than the right. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that booze eventually gives you brain damage. “That McCaffrey guy should climb up on his cross already. There are winners, and there are losers, and he’s just mad he’s on the wrong side.”
Saraub met Wilson’s bloodshot eyes. “And what are you? A winner, or a loser?”
Wilson didn’t answer for a second or two, because his downhill slide had begun thirty years ago, and his kids and two ex-wives didn’t talk to him, and the apartment he rented in Jersey City was full of roaches, and Saraub was the only person this year to give him a job, and by now, it was pity, because his work was shit. “You don’t know your ass from your elbow. And these white wetback hicks from West Virginia you think it’s your job to protect are a bunch of nobodies,” Wilson said. “Worry about your own backyard. Worry about me.”
Tears of rage filled Saraub’s eyes. “What are you bothering getting up in the morning for, if you really believe that? Don’t you see where this is headed? Pretty soon the country’ll be bankrupt—we won’t be a country. You think the rich’ll be happy about the trade they made when there’s nothing left, and their kids are sick from the factory fumes, because the EPA got disbanded? Nobody wants this, and everybody knows it’s happening, we just don’t know how to stop it. That’s how change happens—people like us, forcing it. We have to try, or else Rome falls. That’s the whole point of being alive. Like this plane, or the Empire State Building—it’s so stupid to build something like that, when chances are, it’ll fall. It’s so stupid to try to fly when your feet work just fine. But we keep doing things like that. We change our cultures, our lives, even our biology because change is how we survive. If we give up all that, just because it’s stupid, we’re not human anymore. We’re animals.
“It’s not about those farmers, or the people in West Virginia, who keep lobbying for more digging, even though they’re dying of emphysema. Or the power companies that burn less efficiently every year because they say they can’t afford to build new plants, even though the hurricanes keep getting worse, and we’re growing tropical mold in Mississippi. It’s about us.”
“You don’t know shit,” Wilson spit.
The plane picked up speed. Wilson’s grin twisted into a thin line. He crushed the can and burped again.
“You’re killing yourself, and I don’t like you enough to watch,” Saraub said. The words surprised him, but he was glad. It was a relief to finally say it.
“So point your pretty little eyes someplace else,” Wilson whispered. He lifted his crushed beer, then remembered it was empty. So he put it in the seat pocket in front of him. A nickel tip for the stewardess. Surely she’d be grateful.
Saraub realized then that he should have fired Wilson long ago. He should have confronted