inspo/dialogue

'Oh, you can't deny yourself everything,' Dubreuilh said with a kind of impatience. 'Ascetism is all right if it's spontaneous, but for that you've got to have positive satisfactions elsewhere. And in the world of today, there aren't many. Let me tell you something. If you hadn't slept with Josette, you would have had regrets about it, regrets which would have led you to some other foolishness.'

'That's quite possible,' Henri said.

'You can't draw a straight line in a curved space,' Dubreuilh said. 'You can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper. Whichever way you turn, you're always caught. Still another illusion that has to be got rid of,' he concluded. 'No personal salvation possible.'

Henri looked at Dubreuilh uncertainly. 'Then what's left to us?'

'Not very much, I'm afraid,' Dubreuilh replied.

There was a silence. Henri didn't feel satisfied with that generalized indulgence. 'What I'd like to know is what you would have done in my place,' he said.

'I can't tell you, because I wasn't in your place,' Dubreuilh replied. 'You'd have to tell me everything in detail,' he added.

'I'll tell you everything,' Henri said.

DAYS PASS, wet and icy, each more miserable than the last. The sitters that were to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never show. The standoff enters week two, and the ring of workers at the foot of Mimas turns angry.

“You’re out in the middle of nowhere. Four miles from the nearest person. Things could happen. Nobody would know.”

Maidenhair beams down on them, beatific. “You guys are too decent. You can’t even make a credible threat!”

“You’re killing our livelihood.”

“Your bosses are doing that.”

“Bullshit!”

“One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years. More trees cut, fewer people working.”

Stumped, the loggers wander into other tactics. “For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back! Have you seen the forests south of here?”

“It’s a onetime jackpot,” Watchman shouts down. “A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”

“What’s the matter with you two? Why do you hate people?”

“What are you talking about? We’re doing this for people!”

“These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”

“Great. Let’s grind up your grandfather for dinner, while he still has some meat on him.”

“You’re insane. Why are we even talking to you?”

“We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives.”

One of the loggers revs up his chain saw and whacks the branches of one of Mimas’s largest basal sprouts. He steps back and looks up, brandishing a limb like a sailboat mast. “We feed people. What do you do?”

They shout at Maidenhair, tag team. “We know these forests. We respect these trees. These trees have killed our friends.”

Maidenhair holds still. The idea of a tree killing a person is too much for her to think about.

The men below press their advantage. “You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”

Watchman has seen the numbers. Hundreds of board feet of timber, half a ton of paper and cardboard per person per year. “We need to get smarter about what we need.”

“I need to feed my kids. How about you?”

Watchman sets to shout some things he knows he’ll regret. Maidenhair’s hand on his arm stops him. She’s gazing downward, trying to hear these men, attacked for doing what they’ve been asked to do. For doing something dangerous and vital that they’ve learned to do so well.

“We’re not saying don’t cut anything.” She dangles her arm, reaching out to the men from two hundred feet away. “We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .”

She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too.

[...] Buddy’s mother, during one of Zane’s visits, had said something about how wonderful it was that Zane was helping preserve the balance of nature, and Zane had made a face and said the balance of nature was a dead dodo.

“Nothing is really balanced. Try to think of it as an ongoing poker game, say five-card draw, but everything constantly changes—the money, the card suits, the players, even the table, and every ante is affected by the weather, and you’re playing in a room where the house around you is being demolished.”

Buddy and his father, in sympathy for once, exchanged glances.

“Truth is,” said Zane, “most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. Just tinkering, is one view, another view—”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” said Buddy’s father and silence fell on the table.

He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. Derek realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beach­goers on the distant shore.

“Huh,” Derek said.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.

At today’s meeting the safety man is smooth, calm, but even so, he speaks of horrors. He says to the crowd, “How many of you want to go home today with the disfigured face of a monster? Raise your hand.”

Nobody raises their hand.

“How many of you want to go home today with shattered bones in your chest and waking up for the rest of your life coughing blood and wheezing in the dark dark night?”

No hands raised for that either.

“Okay now how many of you want to go home today missing a finger? Okay two fingers. Wait, how many want to go home today missing both your hands, so you just have two stumps hanging there at the end of your wrists? Raise your hands if you want that to be you.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone says over by the drill press.

"Yes." A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. "Now you have a wife to give you both."

They stood fronting one another. Paul removed his hand from the door. "Caro. For pity's sake."

The figure of speech appeared to move her, and for an instant it seemed she might laugh. Again he pressed what he took for an advantage: "Have a bit of mercy."

She herself leaned back on the chalky wall, and closed her eyes. "How should you hope for mercy, rendering none?"

"These walls are full of dirty quotations, one way and another."

There was silence while she leaned there, austere with her umbrella, sheathed and closed. She roused herself and did step past him, then, to pull at the heavy door.

From behind her, Paul said, "You've got white all over your back." And in the most natural way in the world brushed his hand down her coat. Then passed his arms about her waist and put his mouth to the nape of her neck, and said, "Almighty God."

Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.

“It’s a bad sign,” she says.

He replies drily, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”

After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.

“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”

“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”

“Well, you could have told me that.”

“You could have asked.”

At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.