Want Not (12 page)

“Right, okay,” said Matty. “That’s, like, Freeganism, right? I met some Freegan chick in Portland—”

“Freeganism is a marketing term,” Talmadge sniffed.

“Yeah, we don’t go in for all the
ism
s,” said Micah. “Once you’re an
ism,
you’re political, and that’s a dead end. The labels are just another domestication device. Look at environmentalism. Everyone’s favorite pet
ism.
The golden retriever of
ism
s, right?” She smiled at Talmadge, from whom she’d cribbed that line. “I guarantee you that someone, right now, maybe even on this block, is replacing an incandescent lightbulb with one of those compact fluorescent ones and feeling all nicey and righteous because they’re
helping
the planet. And at the same time, right now, someone else is buying a hybrid car because they want to save the planet. And think about that word, man,
buying.
You just have to sit back for a second and think about the whole psychology there. Those people are doing their part, in their minds. They’re paying their money, they’re doing their part. They can go to bed tonight knowing they’re, like, on the side of the angels. That they’re the good guys—”

“Wait,” Matty said. “Go back. Those are bad things?”

“They’re
meaningless
things,” Micah replied. “They’re placebos, get it? They’re meaningless tools that the system has devised to make people
think
they’re doing something, and to get them to buy something at the same time. It’s like, okay, this architect who got this big environmental hero prize, from the president or something, for putting this so-called ‘living roof’ on a freaking truck factory in Michigan. Planted native grasses and shit up there, called it songbird habitat. I mean, Jesus, just roll that around in your head for a while. Our environmental heroes are the assholes designing
truck
factories. I mean, my fingers can’t do those stupid air quotes fast enough.”

“Yeah, but what are you
saying?
” Matty challenged. “Like, everyone’s supposed to be eating from a dumpster?” Talmadge leaned forward, stiffening in his chair and averting his eyes from Micah’s. This was the side of Matty he’d dreaded: the disruptive, pigheaded Yankee side, dismissive of anything unfamiliar. Like that of a chained dog barking at every stranger, his initial reaction was always to catapult threats or insults. (On their first visit to town together, as Ole Miss freshmen, Matty had looked up at the Confederate war memorial overlooking the Oxford town square and announced, “That’s way too fucking big for a second-place trophy.”) Talmadge noted the level of whiskey in the bottle; from what he remembered, liquor didn’t soften Matty’s edges. He was regretting, now, spilling the beans about Matty jacking that bottle from the dead lady. He’d thought Micah, who shoplifted fairly regularly, might find it amusing, and maybe even respectable, since she deemed waste a greater crime than theft. He’d been puzzled by his own queasiness and had wanted Micah’s verdict. But attitudes colored actions: If Matty acted like a dick, he thought, then that story just dickened him further. I shouldn’t have said anything, Talmadge decided, staring at his boots.

Unflapped, Micah responded, “Don’t get hung up on the foraging. That’s what everyone does. Everybody gets all freaked out about the diving, the whole Freegan thing. What I’m saying is that you can’t fight the system, or even change it, if you’re part of the system, if you’re beholden to it. Because the only weapons the system puts into your hands are different lightbulbs and cars. Chemicals in the same bottle but with a green label and flowers on it. The same old shit with a different label. They’ll comfort you by saying the way out is through
nonsystemic
change. That’s the whole Al Gore thing, right? That we can all
modify
the system to quote-unquote save the planet while maintaining the status quo. But it’s bullshit, man. It’s
beyond
bullshit. The status quo isn’t sustainable. Nonsystemic change doesn’t help when it’s the system that’s the problem.”

Her tone was gaining forcefulness, the inherited embers of her father’s fire and brimstone reddening inside her. Cold, techno-dry words like
nonsystemic
came off her tongue with improbable heat and passion.

“So to answer your question about why we live this way?” she said, raising her hand to encompass the apartment, the cooking smells drifting from the kitchen, the pink sores on Talmadge’s shoulders, the dainty salvaged plate that Matty wasn’t using for an ashtray. “To stay out of the system,” she said. “To say no.”

Talmadge had never heard Micah put it that way, and resisted the downhome urge to spring from his chair shouting amen. But Matty scrunched up his face and, lifting the bottle to his lips, said, “See? That’s where shit like this always gets a big
fail
from me. It’s like all the brothers in prison talking about the
Man.
Who’s the Man? They didn’t know. The guards, the cops, me, whoever. The Man. So all this shit about ‘the system’ is like . . . I mean, whatever. What the fuck is ‘the system’?”

Caustically, Matty laughed, looking to Talmadge for support; but Talmadge had resumed studying his bootlaces, his amen dunked in the muck of his discomfort.

“Civilization,” Micah said.

“Say what?”

“Civilization.”

“Uh . . . go on.”

“The entire structure of society. The way it’s driven by growth. The whole concept of
progress
which is as arrogant and stupid as Manifest Destiny.”

“Manif . . . ?” Matty’s lifted hands conveyed the question mark.

“You know, the idea that white people were ordained by God to settle the West and murder the indigenous peoples. Totally indefensible today, in the exact same way that civilization will be indefensible a hundred years from now. Civilization is like, like some drug that we can’t get enough of, can’t resist, that we’re helpless without. But producing that drug requires the systematic destruction of the planet. Every ounce of civilization requires, like, a hundred pounds of soil and air and water, and then generates, like, fifty pounds of waste. The math doesn’t work, right? It’s simple. At the end of the equation there’s nothing but waste.”

Dropping his cigarette, then screwing it into the floor with his bootheel, Matty said, “Then why not live in the woods? I mean, Jesus, if civilization is the problem, what are you doing living . . . downtown?”

“Because there’s no woods
left,
” Micah said flatly.

“Come on. I know the shit’s bad, global warming and all, but—”

“Listen, it’s
gone,
” she said. “It’s all claimed. It’s all surveyed. There is no wilderness left.”

“Okay, but what I’m saying is, listen, I just come off a three-thousand-mile bus ride, right? And I was staring at a whole lot of empty . . .”

“And all of it’s on someone’s schedule for drilling or developing or irrigating or whatever. They’re just the last few remaining puzzle pieces that haven’t been fitted yet—”

“Parks?” Matty squeaked, and Talmadge could see he was now just fighting to fight.

“The so-called wilderness areas that the government sets aside,” Micah said coolly, “are like elephants in a circus. You know, with their legs shackled in irons, performing tricks for the crowds. They’re no more natural than that. They’re managed, they’re groomed, they’re scenery, set dressing. Look, my daddy tried that, living off the grid. Bless his fool heart, he’s still trying. But he’d be the first to tell you, there is no off the grid. Not anymore. The grid reaches everywhere. Tell some Eskimo woman in, like, the most remote regions of the Arctic that she’s living off the grid, and you know what she could say? She could ask you why her breastmilk is contaminated with crisis levels of PCBs. Okay? Go out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The very middle, as far from any land as you can get. And you know what’s there? A floating garbage patch that’s nearly the size of Africa. One hundred million tons of debris. So tell me where the grid ends. Show me the city limits sign of civilization.”

“You’re kinda freaking me out,” Matty said. He was surrendering, Talmadge saw. Micah was beating him down. Or was she cornering him?

At this Micah grinned, and, seeing the curl of that smile, Talmadge exhaled for what seemed the first time in minutes. “Good,” she said softly. “If the world isn’t freaking you out, you’re not paying attention. And what’s everybody doing about it? Changing their lightbulbs.”

“While the, uh, polar bears are dying,” Matty snorted agreeably.

“Yeah, right, but it’s not about polar bears.” Matty was taking her side, Talmadge noted, but she wasn’t letting him off that easily. “I mean, no offense to polar bears, but if people think it’s just about polar bears then they won’t even change the stupid lightbulbs. That’s what the system
needs
you to think. Look, you know how genocide works, right? The leaders convince people that certain other people are different. That they’re the
other,
right? Like the indigenous peoples, all over the world. They’re so different, primitive, barbaric, evil, whatever, that we can kill them.
Should
kill them. That’s how they get wars to work. But the whole polar bear thing is like, like the flip side of that. I mean, the polar bears are just one example, but it’s like . . . they’re the
other.
But what I mean about the flip side is that instead of being the enemy, they’re the victims. But they’re still the other, get it? And it’s the same deal. The more we separate ourselves from them, the more we say it’s about them, the less we understand that there is no other. And the less we understand that everything we’re doing to them, we’re also doing to us.”

“Right,” Matty said.

But Micah was like a spring that, while released, had more uncoiling to do, more energy to expend. “That drug, civilization? It requires more than destroying the planet. It requires that we destroy
ourselves,
too, with, like, murder and rape and war and genocide and by burying ourselves alive in waste. But that’s just the surface wounds, understand? There are deeper wounds. Have you ever seen a chicken farm?”

Matty shook his head.

“They keep the chickens hunched over all the time so that their breasts overdevelop,” Micah said. “They snip off their beaks because if they don’t the chickens will rip each other apart from the stress. They use artificial lighting to disrupt the daily cycle so that the chickens eat as much as possible, all the time. They pipe in, like, elevator music to keep the chickens from rioting. They pump them with massive amounts of antibiotics because without them, in those artificial, like, circumstances, the chickens will die. But a lot of them die anyway from this thing called ascites. That’s when the heart and lungs can’t keep up with the rapid growth rate. The chickens
grow
themselves to death, right? Too much too fast.”

Matty, who had happily scarfed down a KFC three-piece dinner in Grand Junction, Colorado, while the bus was refueling, stared at her, unfazed. He wasn’t getting the chicken talk.

“Poor chickens, right?” she said.

He nodded, thinking
tasty
chickens, too.

“There’s good people who want to change all that, make it more humane,” she said.

“Cool,” Matty said.

“But they’re not seeing the bigger picture. Almost everything that’s happening to those chickens is happening to us. The natural world can’t sustain us anymore, so we’ve resorted to all these artificial means to keep the system working, to keep it from collapsing. I mean, it all lines up, when you think about it, even the freaking breastmeat fixation. The only difference is that the chickens get eaten at the end. We get pumped with toxins and stuffed into a steel box. But that’s it, get it? You see what I’m saying, man? The chickens aren’t the other. They’re us. We’re all locked in this system together. We’re not in wire cages but they call it the grid anyway. We’re even losing our ability to think, our, like,
primal
ability, but it doesn’t matter because they’re pumping us with synthetic drugs designed to make us content to, to not even
try.
Antidepressants, ADD medications, whatever. Just take a pill and change the lightbulbs, right? That’s the prescription. That’ll make everything all right. Just keep smiling and buying.”

Micah was almost startled, when she looked up, by the rapt, unblinking stares she was fielding from Talmadge and Matty, as if she hadn’t known these thoughts of hers were being channeled through her vocal cords. She hadn’t even registered Matty’s responses.

Foggily, she said, “What was the question again?” This was a standard laughline for verbose after-dinner speakers who’d lost their trail of thought, but there was no mirth in it—Micah’s expression was funereal, earnest. Waiting, Matty and Talmadge said nothing.

“Oh yeah,” she said, nodding, reentering the world from what her father called “the sermon current”—the powerful tide that seems to lift and carry a preacher away from his congregation and into some sacred subliminal wormhole. “Why we do this, right? That’s why. That’s why. I don’t want to smile and buy. We need to weep, and scream, and . . . fucking
resist,
man. The whole thing is rigged,” she said, and looking to Talmadge, she added, “And we’re not playing.”

For a long absorptive while they were silent. “Shit,” Matty finally said, as he lit another cigarette, the clicks from his failing lighter sounding like the hammerings of a spent pistol. “You guys are fucking serious. That’s cool.” Looking around the room, he added, “I could get into this.” Only then, as Talmadge and Micah followed his gaze, noting the orange fire-nub of the cigarette glowing like the first star emerging in the dusk sky, did they all realize how dark the room had become.

Talmadge snatched the lighter and aimed it—with a grip trembling from love and something like missionary zeal, a religious euphoria—at a candle. He struggled to suppress the smile his mouth was forming, which struck him as inappropriate, boyish, selfish; unable to stifle it, however, he covered his mouth with a hand, as if thoughtfully rubbing his beard. “I could get into this,” Matty had said. Here was his past, aligning with his future. Here was a wholeness: a mission, a woman, perhaps now a comrade. Though their companionship had been brief, Matty was Talmadge’s only durable friend; everyone else he’d abandoned, as their lives had calcified (in Talmadge’s view) and his had swelled and flowered. He chided himself for having worried about Matty and Micah: about the whiskey, Matty’s cynicism. Here they were, only a couple of hours into their reunion, and Micah—sweet holy Micah—had already converted him, or at least neutralized any of the expected wariness, the harsh volley of what-the-fucks. Something about the power of three: They’d been alone for so long, he and Micah. In that time they’d learned things,
understood
things, broken code after code. There was satisfaction, Talmadge realized, in passing it on, in widening the circle. It felt good to come down from the mountain, to be human again. In the yellow candlelight everything felt ancient and true, and the world outside, as for the earliest Christians huddled in their desert caves, debased yet redeemable.