On a Clear Day (8 page)

“Why?”

“Everybody is afraid of letting life get away from them,”
Michael said. “I think it’s like when people get
old—not just years old but in the way they think—and they see young people
flying on the momentum of just being young, they sometimes get all shook and crazy and
want to bring things back to some kind of order. Life is getting away from them. They
want to slow it down and box it up.”

“That sounds right,” I said. I poured some orange juice into
the pan, turned up the heat, and waited as the flavors came together. “In the
band, how do you know if you have the right people?”

Michael watched me take the pan off the stove and use the spoon to put
half the food onto a plate. Then I took the other half for myself, gave him a fork and
the salt shaker, and sat down.

“If you have the right people, it just works out,” he said.
He hesitated for a minute, looked at me and smiled, then dug his fork into some
mushrooms. When he lifted his head again, his eyes moved around the room as if he was
looking for something. “You don’t always know if you have the right
people, because you can’t tell what people are like. Not really. I mean, you can
guess, but …”

A shrug. His eyes were looking around the room but not really seeing
anything, just moving, and I knew he was thinking. But
what
?

“You do computer models of groups,” he said after a while.
“But you don’t really know who the people are, right?”

“You don’t have to know who they are to know what
they’ll do,” I said.

“Are you ever wrong?”

“A lot, but it doesn’t make a
difference,” I answered. “Because if you do the model right, it means
you’ve thought through everything carefully. That’s half the
battle.”

“You’ve got carrot on your chin,” he said.

“Thank you.” I felt around, found the little piece of
carrot, and took it off.

“Dahlia.” Michael leaned forward. “The fewer people
you have in a model, the less effective it is, right?”

“It depends on their connection with group thinking,” I
said. “If they’re stuck with thinking as a group, it doesn’t matter
that much.”

“Awesome,” he said.

Silence. When he ate, he didn’t make noises on his plate with his
fork, as a Dominican man would have done. He ate quietly, his head mostly down. What the
hell was he thinking? We were sitting at opposite ends of the small table. It was only
three feet long, so we were pretty close. I kept my eyes on my plate. When he looked up,
he was checking out the rest of my little apartment.

“I think this is going to work,” he said after a while.
“I’m eager to get to the first meeting tomorrow. What do you
think?”

“I’ll tell you after I leave the meeting.”

At the door. That little smile again.

Me: “See you later.”

Michael: “You look good with carrot on your chin.”

I was embarrassed.

He left and I looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad. Even without the
carrot.

It was a twenty-five-minute ride to Dulwich College in south London. A
British girl, or she might have been Irish, with long red hair was driving the van. She
drove like a freaking maniac, and I was hoping that somebody would suggest they put the
thing on automatic. The grounds at Dulwich were large and spacious. We got out and
walked into the building. There was a big boat in the lobby, and one of the Brits
started explaining why it was there.

Then another door opened and a group of about fifty boys, sweaty, dressed
in green sweatshirts and matching pants, came rushing through. They slowed when they saw
us—I thought they were looking at Michael mostly—and just kind of milled
about, filling the air with a kind of boy stink and noise that sounded like a bunch of
puppies. They had long hair, which they busily pushed away from their faces. Then they
were looking at the rest of us.

“Your fan club,” I said to Michael.

A priest-looking dude came along and shooed the boys away, and then we
were shown into a huge gorgeous room with brown paneled walls, crazy high ceilings, and
chandeliers.

“This must be where they breed them,” Anja whispered.

The room had rows of chairs facing the windows. A small platform was set
up, and one of the Brits who had driven with us went to it. He introduced himself and
said how sad he was to announce that five groups had canceled at the last minute.

“But those of us who are here will, I am sure,
make up in spirit what we lack in numbers,” he said. “What I hope we do
today is meet one another, exchange ideas and contact information, and begin the process
that profitably leads to synergy and results. All this with the certainty that our
activities are being monitored. The presence of other groups in and around London
suggests that there is also an attempt to minimize our activities. Yet we move on. And
it is with this hope that I greet and welcome you to my alma mater, Dulwich College.

“The tablets you found on your seats will provide instantaneous
translations of what is being said and also give you the opportunity to talk among
yourselves. The motto of the Dulwich school in Singapore is ‘Building bridges to
the world.’ What we hope we can do is build not only bridges, but roads, tunnels,
and air paths to a better life for all this earth’s people. Thank
you.”

There was a formal printed program. Anja opened it and found a brief
description of the C-8 group.

“Nothing new here,” she said.

I looked over the list.

Anja was right, nothing new.

The greetings were first, and then there would be six delegations making
presentations. Michael was speaking next to last.

The first speaker was a thin kid with rimless glasses. I didn’t
know many kids who wore glasses. He started his speech with his head back, saying
something nobody could understand. I thought he was speaking a different language at
first, and then I began to understand what he was saying.

“Theeeey aaaare eeeee-vil!” He kept saying it over and over
again. Bullshit drama to the core.

Anja was two seats down from me and shaking her head. There was a space
between us where Javier’s wheelchair had been for a second or two before he
wheeled off and got into a hush-hush conversation with one of the Brits.
Anja pointed to her tablet and I looked down at mine. She was texting me.

Interesting. I had always thought of C-8 as evil people too. But if they
did believe in what they were doing, thinking it was somehow right for them to be taking
advantage of the weak or the ignorant or whoever they were standing on at the time, I
knew it would be easier to build a model mapping out their behavior. True believers in
money, like true believers in Heaven, or Hell, or anything, were wonderfully
predictable.

Two Australians came up together and got into a long rap about how nobody
could beat C-8 because they had all the weapons and all we had was our ideals. The
Australians were true believers too.

When it got to be Michael’s turn, I found myself tensing up. I
wanted him to do well. It was like he was representing the guys from America, which was
good, but there was more.

Michael hunched his shoulders and tapped the mike twice before
beginning.

“I’ve never been in a shooting war where people scream and
fall down in pain. The thought of it scares the hell out of me. But the war we’re
in, a war in which the enemy delivers shiny kitchen appliances to your front door, and
in which they have rows and rows of frozen meals available
in
supermarkets, is a war nevertheless. We have simply skipped over the body counts. The
term ‘body count’ started showing up seventy years ago in Vietnam. It
sounded better than ‘dead people,’ so the papers and the after-action
reports people used the phrase a lot.

“Then somebody, probably Americans, came up with the term
‘collateral damage.’ That meant people who were dead or wounded but not
necessarily identified as the ‘enemy.’ That’s the world we live in
today; that’s the war we are facing today. Huge companies bring marvelous gadgets
to our lives and there is collateral damage. Perhaps a few thousand children dead in
India, or an African village decimated, or a few hundred miners in West Virginia quietly
coughing their lungs out.

“What we need to do is to start calling dead bodies by their
rightful name: ‘dead bodies.’ If they get killed fighting for scraps of
food in Detroit, or die waiting for medicines in China or Russia, we have to start
seeing them.

“We can’t continue to let the global corporate masters keep
on pushing people to the edges of society and then condemn them as outsiders. We
can’t give in to the idea that the immorality of greed that is killing our planet
is somehow all right if it can be justified in any small corner of the world. The enemy
is already within the gates; they are among us, seducing us with their baubles and
playthings, as they quietly take away our futures.

“I hope we will fight together for a clear day in which everyone
sees every truth. Thank you.”

There was a little applause, and then the Brits stood
up and began to clap loudly, and some joy crept into the place.

Good, Michael. Damned good.

On the way back to central London. The Brits were chatty, talking about
some messages they had received and reassuring us that the low turnout didn’t
mean anything. I was pleased, but I felt myself zoning out and knew I needed some
serious sleep time.

An exchange of information at the hotel while the doorman, a big, beefy
dude, looked on. The van was pulling away, and we all seemed tired as we went into the
lobby.

“It’s a promising start,” Michael said.

“Promising?” Drego. “If you believe that shit,
you’re dumber than you look!”

We froze at the sudden tension of the out-of-the-blue put-down. I glanced
over at Drego and saw his neck was puffed as if he was ready to leap at somebody. Behind
him, just peering around his shoulder, was Mei-Mei, staring at Michael.

“Well, I think it was promising,” Michael said softly.