After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

JUNE 2014

Julie continued to read the papers obsessively: "STARVATION REACHES CRITICAL POINT IN SOMALIA." "OVERPOPULATION BIGGEST THREAT TO PLANET." But nothing more was mentioned about the mutated bacteria, not anywhere in the world. Nor could she find anything on-line. If the story about K. planticola was being repressed, several countries must be cooperating in doing that, by every means available. The completeness of the suppression was almost as scary as the microbial mutation.

Almost.

Several times she picked up the phone to call Fanshaw’s office. Each time she laid it down again. If there was a cover-up going on, if there really were scientists and covert organizations and high officials in several countries working to keep this from the public, then Julie did not want to call any attention to herself. Fanshaw had probably, given his narcissism, erased any trace of help from anybody else in crafting the article he never got to publish. He would, of course, have preserved her nondisclosure agreement, and Julie could only hope he had it in a safe, secret place. But he had also written her a check “For professional services,” and she had cashed it.

She Googled him. Until two weeks ago he had been all over the Net. Then his posts on Facebook ceased, as did his blog.

“You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. They sat under an awning in her back yard, drinking cold lemonade and watching Linda’s three kids splash in the pool. Alicia lay asleep in her infant seat. The beach-cottage-in-August scheme had been dropped; Linda and Ted were taking the children to visit their grandmother in Winnipeg, where it was twenty-five degrees cooler.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said.

“Everything all right? The consulting?”

“Going better than I’d dared hope. And I’m making a lot more money than I was teaching.”

“Well, I can see that Alicia’s all right. So… Ju, is it Gordon? I know he called the night Alicia was born. You were on the floor with Jake, I burst in, and Gordon’s voice was coming from your answering machine.”

Linda had never mentioned this before. It had been two days before Julie even listened to Gordon’s message: “We’ve had another kidnapping. A three-year-old boy taken from his bed in southern Vermont.”

She said to Linda, “He called about the work project. You know I can’t discuss it with you.”

“I know. Spook stuff. But that wasn’t all he said. At the end his voice changed completely when he said, ‘Are you all right?’ Have you seen him since? Do you miss him? Is that why you seem so… not here?”

Julie put her hand, cold from the lemonade glass, over her friend’s. “No, I haven’t seen him. And no, I don’t miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, like it proves I’m a shallow person.”

Linda grinned. “You’re not that. Still waters, brackish but deep.”

“Thanks. I think.” And then, before she knew she was going to say it, “Linda, did you ever read James Lovelock?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do you believe… do you think there are things about the universe that we can’t explain? Things that lie so far beyond science they’re something else entirely?”

“I lapsed from Catholicism when I was fourteen,” Linda said, “and never saw any reason to unlapse. Ju, have you suddenly got religion?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s not anything, really. Just the heat.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait until we leave for—Colin! If you do that one more time you’re getting out of the pool, do you hear me?”

Alicia woke. Colin did that one more time. Normal life, routine and mundane as precious as the propagation of plants.