When the room was entirely full, the newcomers overflowed into the hallway, then into the stairwell, then down onto the ground floor and, when the whole house was full, into the yard, and even into the yard next door, where, as they stood unseen among the wedding guests, their attention (despite the revelry going on all around them) stayed riveted, always, on my charge’s window.
Crowded, he said.
Normal, I said. Happens every time.
Every time what? he said.
Then, on something like a bier, or litter, or royal palanquin, a young man was passed up through the crowd until, somehow perceiving that he’d arrived at his intended destination, he stepped off the litter, moved to the bed, and, standing a bit unsteadily, gazed down at my charge.
Who recognized him immediately.
It was—good God. The curly-haired college kid. From Chicago. Who’d come up to him after one of his talks. At the U of. All those years ago. Smart kid, articulate young guy, nervously passing his watch from hand to hand as he politely asked a series of questions in the rapidly emptying—
All these years he’d never been able to get this brat out of his head.
And I think you know why, the kid said.
I’m making you with my mind, said my charge.
You’re not, the kid said.
You dead? said my charge.
Kid winced.
Sir, is it really the case that the earth is cooling? he said, ignoring the question, intent, it seemed, on resuming their previous conversation.
His eyes were, as before, positively piercing.
See, that makes zero sense to me, he said (said again, as he had all those years ago).
Also, he said, hadn’t there been studies?
Here it came, thought my charge.
Ah, Christ, here it came (again).
Studies your own company did? the kid said. And didn’t those studies indicate that the earth was, in fact, heating up, due to human activity? And didn’t you come to know about those studies? And didn’t your company, on the basis of those studies, redesign your offshore drilling rigs to accommodate the seas that you, from those studies, knew would be rising?
I don’t know of any studies of the type you’re mentioning, my charge said stiffly.
A murmur of discontent ran through the crowd.
There was also a memo, the kid said. You oil pigs got together and planned the whole thing out, didn’t you? Deny, delay, obfuscate. You were all in on it. But you—you led it. You were the leader of the liars.
Well, the kid hadn’t said that in Chicago.
I’m saying it now, the kid said. I know about it now. In my current state, I know a lot. I know exactly who you are, and everything you did.
My charge felt the urge to shut it down. By walking off in the abrupt, purposely dismissive way he’d developed over many years of telegraphing displeasure to absolute nobodies.
But couldn’t move. The kid just stood there, glaring.
He had to fight.
Fight this crap.
Look, first off, he said. Nobody’d told him a thing about any studies.
The crowd erupted in laughter.
No, come on, think about it: Was he, as CEO, supposed to know every single detail about every minor bit of research ever done, at even the lowest levels of the company, one of the largest companies in the world, by the way, if not the largest, as well as (thank you very much) consistently the most profitable? Or did he, perhaps, have a good number of other, more important things to worry about?
Therefore, he’d had no idea—zero—about those studies. Zilch. About which so many were now blabbing such absolute crap.
The silence of the kid and the hundreds of thousands of gathered dead made the falseness of this statement uncomfortable even to him.
Well, okay, yes, fine. What did they think he was, an idiot? The kind of dillweed whose underlings would dare fail to brief him on studies that had a direct bearing on his business? The kind of manager who’d tolerate being left in the dark? Jesus, yes, of course he’d known about those studies, he’d read them cover to cover, as was his responsibility, but he’d been under no fiduciary obligation whatsoever to disclose/publicize such studies, if, in fact, such studies even—
Oh, he knew how it looked.
It looked like he’d known.
Known all along.
Lied about it publicly while privately taking such actions as necessary to protect the firm’s—
Well, Jesus Christ, it hadn’t been just him. Had it? Hell, no. What about Sawyer, what about Edwards and Chen and Archbold and Keaton? What about R. D. Smitts, Velasco, Purdy, Diamond, Trencher, Filipi? What about Wendell Boot, Tammy Whitman? What about that crowd? What about the guys/gals from the other big operations? Malcolm Handy at Centoil, Brian Haster at Globaco/Bexi? They knew, they all knew, they had research departments of their own, their names were all on that goddamn API memo.
A gust of something like panic swept over my charge.
Had he?
“Lied”?
Lied, then?
In a sense?
If viewed from a certain—
Ah, fuck it, what did it matter now, what a former waitress and a punk with a bad suit and a bunch of sprites or ghosts or whatnot thought of him? He’d be dead soon. And free. Free of this body. As he’d been when young. When young you were free of your body because it only brought you pleasure. He remembered clearing a chain-link fence in one go; swimming from dusk to dawn, breaking only for lunch; racing up a flight of stairs at Yost Field House, back down, up again, just because he could; diving into Crow Creek, zero fear; helping Denise and Rick Whoever move into their place on Wanamaker: crossing the lawn singing “Que Sera, Sera” at the top of his lungs, a box of records on his head, bottle of beer in one hand, window shade in the other.
Soon he’d be powerful like that again.
He just had to get out of this body.
And with this he began seeking death, opening himself eagerly up to it, seeing it as the end of something difficult: not his whole life (which had been wonderful) but just this last phase of it, and not even this whole last day, no, just this evening, and not even the whole evening, just the part of it that began when I came here and started filling his mind with doubts about who he was and what he’d done.
But that was finished now and the next phase was about to begin.
