The Subprimes (5 page)

There were hundreds of reporters killing days in their satellite vans or drinking at the Beach House, and in their frustration they were door-stopping local residents to ask them what they thought of Whalemageddon. Gemma's intercom had been buzzing steadily with reporters asking to speak with “a resident,” none of the reporters actually realizing that she was a principal in the last story they had cared about. When she told them to stop buzzing and that she wasn't interested in talking about the whales, they stumbled back down her driveway and on to the next house. Still, she couldn't make her daily five-mile run down the beach and was reduced to running on the treadmill in the basement fitness room. The neighborhood had gone to the whales.

The broker, an attractive brunette in a pressed white blouse and gray slacks, told Gemma she could get $20,000 a month year round, or $60,000 a month between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

“Why?” Gemma asked. “The weather doesn't work anymore. What difference does it make when you rent it?”

It had hit eighty degrees one day last January. And it had snowed before Labor Day.

The broker nodded. Gemma suspected the broker knew who she was but was too polite to mention it.

“Tradition,” the broker said and shrugged.

“I just want to rent it. Now. I don't want to wait.”

“We'll send our guys out here to photograph it today.”

The broker gave a smile that Gemma detested for the sympathy she perceived. Or was this the usual default smile of a woman who worked in a business where pleasing buyers and sellers started with a vacant grin?

Franny and Ginny had become bogged down sorting through their old toys. And these were only the second-tier toys, the stuff that had not been loved enough to make it back to the city. How long would it take them to sort through the city toys? Gemma had been tempted to toss every photo of Arthur into the plastic garbage bags but decided, for her daughters' sake, that she had to save a few. She went through the bedrooms, tossing out old magazines, boxing up books, and trying to figure out what to do with the various driftwood and seashell tchotchkes that inhabited coffee tables and bookshelves. She picked up a carton filled with seashells and coral bits and conch and took it out on the deck to the wooden railing that lined the pool and cast the marine detritus back onto the beach.

She walked over to the pool and opened the doors to the slatted wooden chests where the pool equipment and aquatic toys
were kept, the masks, snorkels, goggles, noodles, and flippers that at the end of a summer day were strewn all over the deck. She began to gather the rubber gear, some of it still sandy, but then dropped it. Whoever rented the place could use all this stuff as well.

She walked back to the edge of the deck, which had been built years ago, in contravention of local ordinances, over the sea-grassy dunes. The cloud cover was thick above her, giving way at the horizon, where a sliver of golden light and blue sea extended in a long strip as far as she could see in both directions. The appearance of that strip of light to the east was momentarily disorienting, making Gemma feel as if it were early morning instead of midafternoon.

A few hundred seagulls standing at attention on the beach, facing the whales, were patiently awaiting the dying that they sniffed in the breeze. What was worse—humans feasting on the spectacle or seagulls hoping for an actual feast?

She would leave tonight if she could.

I
N THIS CLIMACTIC AGE OF
American capitalism, the endgame, I suspect, where the forces of profit and avarice are putting the final squeeze on all of us and we find ourselves subsiding in a denuded wasteland of McMansions, succumbing to antibiotic-resistant strains of mutated microbes or shriveling as our multiplying tumors are excised from our bodies and watching our final generation of obese, attention-deficit-disordered children grow up functionally illiterate and capable only of sliding their thick fingers across touch screens until finally the Chinese think of a product that all this American flesh can be made into—sofas, perhaps, an appropriate use for couch potatoes—I find myself still plying my trade despite all evidence to the contrary.

Getting through full days of this shit—watching the world end fucking sucks—requires some of the strongest weed ever grown. My marijuana provided now by the same companies that
formerly retailed cigarettes—Atria, R. J Reynolds, Liggett—and that have driven the mom-and-pop medical marijuana shops out of business.

This is what it's come to. In my early middle age, I've become a more grown-up version of the stoner I was at sixteen, only now I can afford better weed and munchies. But the rest of it, my life, if you actually followed the path of my day, like one of those
Family Circus
cartoons where a dotted line traces the activities of the young rascal of an afternoon, would make Mr. Farnsworth and Mrs. Shirley, two high school teachers who foretold my adult fecklessness, feel smug.

For my journey through my day lacks a specific vigor. I do the minimum. I try to prepare the children for school, pack their lunches, even drive them on late mornings or when they can't be compelled to walk, contributing, in this way and many others, to the carbon-emissions nightmare we have careened toward in our SUVs—I still drive a hybrid, grandfathered in from when hybrids and electric cars were still legal—and, for the most privileged among us, private jets. I am the adequate father of Ronin and Jinx, the boy thirteen and the girl ten; ex-husband of Anya, former wife of fourteen years. I knew having children was an awful idea; it invests you. Suddenly, the malignant activities of man, our tireless turning-to-shit of everything around us, of ourselves, even, all makes us anxious because of them. Our kids will have to live in all this shit, shit that we have all made. We suck.

So, however long it takes to get from here to Armageddon, until we are more tumor than human, until our Earth is more landfill than land, until our seas are more plastic bags than H20, I have to keep muddling through, providing for a family; making sure my children are clothed, fed, vaccinated; getting pipes snaked and modems rebooted and cats deflead.

Or, at least I did when there were still cats.

Remember cats? They were cute.

WHILE I'M WALKING TO MY
office, down the narrow, putatively charming streets, Iliff, Albright, Bashford, lined with two-story Cape Cod–style houses, the bulk of these monstrosities too big for the lots, crowding out the vestigial front yards that are too small for any children to play catch on, much more mount a touch football game, if any children can be induced to look up from PlayStation 7 or X
³
-Box long enough to consider an actual game involving sticks and balls instead of paddles and joysticks, I see jogging past me a woman, attractive, freckled face, narrow reddish neck, tanned clavicle, Lycra T-shirt. She wears headphones, of course, and sunglasses, and runs on her heels, her skintight jodphur-like trousers making swishing noises as she passes. And behind her trails a pointy-snouted dog, sharp-eared, high curled tail, tongue hanging from a mouthful of glistening teeth. No collar. Gray and rust coat. The canine regards me warily as it trots past. It takes me a few seconds but . . . that's no dog.

That's a coyote. In high morning, a full six hours past its bedtime. And this nasty creature is padding along, stalking, apparently, a jogger.

What did I say? About end times?

“Hey, lady,” I shout. “Miss! HEY!”

Her headphones drown me out.

The two of them, jogger and coyote, are moving too fast. I hesitate to give chase. But I turn, trot after them, waving my hands, the coyote turning to watch me for a moment, as if to confirm, yes, a human is chasing me. Ah, the hunter is now the hunted! The coyete's eyes are green-brown, pupils slit and appraising, also inquisitive, as if—is this guy, this man, this biped, serious?

He yips. High-pitched, followed by a long, drawn-out growl that sounds almost thoughtful.

Who does this mutt think he is talking to? I retain the pride in being of the species
Homo sapiens
, still ruler of this planet. The coyotes are inheriting the Earth, of course, up to twenty pups a litter, vast tracts of foreclosed homes to thrive in and around, their only natural predator, the mountain lion, having been driven to extinction. And for years they've been growing fat on domesticated cats, who themselves are in danger of extinction. They've moved up the food chain and lately have been increasingly attacking humans. But can't you, coyote, wait just a decade or two? Then all this will be yours.

Then from behind me I hear clicking noises, paws and claws on concrete, and I turn and see trotting on the road behind me another pair of coyotes. And making fast progress beside me on the lawn above a white retaining wall is another. They all run in the same tongue-dangling-from-mouth manner, and they look past me, as if they aren't interested in me at all, as if they are just having a little trot, a midmorning constitutional.

Yet we are—I am—being hunted. Did coyotes begin hunting humans in broad daylight when they ran out of cats?

When I turn back to the jogger, the coyote in front of me is gone and I see the jogger's shapely posterior just a few strides ahead of me. I seem to have accelerated.

I can pass the woman, leave her to her fate, but instead I decide to stop her and warn her of the situation. Perhaps we can trot to my house, or to my car, drive to have coffee, laugh about our moment in the food chain.

But when I reach out to touch her arm, she jumps and slows down, removing her headphone from one ear.

“Coyotes,” I say and jerk my thumb over my shoulder.

She looks over her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

I look back again.

The animals have vanished.

I suddenly see the situation from her point of view: bedraggled, somewhat hairy and wild-looking pedestrian comes out of nowhere and accosts her, claiming a nocturnal animal is stalking her at eleven a.m.

“Don't you dare touch me,” she says, “or I'll Mace your face.”

Her right hand comes up with a pepper-spray bottle, which she fires at my head.

I gag, cough, and sprint forward just to get out of the cloud of gas. “You said ‘OR,'” I gasp. “You said ‘OR I'll Mace you.' And I didn't touch—”

“Fuck you, subprime,” she shouts and runs ahead.

My face hurts, the inside of my nostrils, my throat, my esophagus, my larynx, my mouth, my tongue, everything is stinging, burning as if I have been submerged in Tabasco. And the more I breathe, the more I burn.

I lie down on the grassy berm between the curb and the sidewalk, trying to take shallow breaths, trying not to breathe at all, waiting for the pain to subside.

But it never really does.

IN MY OFFICE THERE IS
a metallic desk covered with paper that is itself coated with a layer of soot, the sediment left by the thick clouds of particulate smog that back up against our mountains, turning the sky its orange-brown, the leaves gray, even giving my snot a black tinge. The soot is piled so thick where the desk meets the wall that it has made a small filth dune. My corner office faces east and north, there is a cocktail sign for the bar downstairs on the outside where those two walls meet, a red neon cursive that blinks on at dusk. I have a metallic bookcase
and a metallic chair with a rust-colored seat, all of this furniture the surplus of a local tool-and-die company bought by the Chinese decades ago.

I am surrounded by self-help professionals. There is a life coach next door, a blond woman of indeterminate age with an impressive bust who makes her visitors take off their shoes and leave them beneath a stool outside her office. There is an immense black woman next door to her who drives a dune buggy and practices some sort of aromatherapy. There is a woman who wears sandals and works in an office with a sign on the door that says “Creative Success Strategies.” I'm not sure what any of these people actually do, but there's apparently a huge business in seeking to assuage the bad feelings of the many.

I sometimes feel like stopping their clients and telling them that they feel bad because things are actually getting shittier. “It's not you. It's the whole world.” But I just walk past them to my office, where I drop my backpack and then go out to the men's room to wash more pepper spray off my face.

I have a career. Or had one. I am something of a fluke in that I make a living from writing: list articles, stories for longform fetishists, books every so often. I was fortunate in that I started when journalism was a vast and thriving field: I was a writer for
Time
and then
Sports Illustrated
, secured contracts at profligate start-ups and the relaunched
Bloomberg Businessweek
. I turned one of my early articles into a popular book,
What You Wish For
, about a small town in Pennsylvania that became environmentally devastated, but wealthy, through fracking, and was then destroyed by petty infighting and alcoholism, like a village of drunken lottery winners. I've done nothing of comparable quality or success since, but editors and content curators still recognize my name. I'm a hack, but at least hackery supports my family, or has supported us. Amid the great prairie fire of media failure, I
have thrived. Though I owe everyone stories. I am perpetually behind, and falling further.

Lawsuits were the best thing ever to happen to my career. No magazine wants to fire a writer who is a codefendant in a multimillion-dollar libel suit. So the great empire of Bloomberg and I are still in business, only because their lawyers don't want to risk turning me against the company. I remain on the draw, a modest sum sloshing into my bank account every month as my latest lawsuit trudges its way through the courts.

My editor at Bloomberg calls, a smart man, Rajiv, who is second in command.

“Larry Ellison,” he says.

This is what editors do. They call me up and say a name.

I sometimes say one back.

“Sean Parker.”

He seems to think about this and then says:

“Andrew Mason.”

I don't know who that is, so I Google him. I quickly come up with a reply.

“Reed Hastings.”

That seems to have satisfied him.

“Let me think about that and get back to you.”

I can picture him on the third floor of the Bloomberg building, sitting behind his terminal, which I am sure he doesn't know how to operate.

I decide to have a little fun with him and ask for a bond quote, which, if he actually knew how to use the terminal, would be easy.

“Hey,” I say to Rajiv, “can you tell me what GE '28 five and halfs are trading at?”

“Fuck you,” he says. “Hey, stop getting sued, okay?”

He hangs up.

I am about to open up an e-mail from Bloomberg's lawyer, who recently, and correctly, deduced that the story on the Texas mega-preacher Pastor Roger, whose chapel is a converted football stadium, was so poorly reported that to call it a fabrication would be giving me too much credit. I had indeed made a key error in claiming that Pastor Roger participated in a college danceathon in support of Planned Parenthood while he was at Oral Roberts. But there was so much else wrong with my story, the preacher's age, wife's name, number of children, grad school, and so forth, that it would be hard for him to claim malice or libelous intent. Because I got EVERYTHING wrong. The lawyer, Ed Minskoff, was delighted when he discovered just how badly I had fucked up.

“Stupidity
is
a defense,” he said in a conference call that included many of Bloomberg's top brass.

“You just have to be you” was how Rajiv paraphrased the defense strategy, should I be called to testify.

The lawyer sends out weekly updates as to the progress of the case. Pastor Roger, who among other things scoffed at the notion of global warming and climate change and government regulation to ensure clean drinking water and
E. coli
–free produce, was on television just yesterday claiming again that there was still so much space in the United States that every family in America could have a five-bedroom home with a three-car garage and a backyard and that wouldn't even fill up Texas! In his sermons he insists that God gave us oil and gas and land and grain, the animals, the plants, “the rocks, the dust, the oceans, the sky, it's all ours! And that doesn't mean just that part of the Earth the federal government says is our ‘dominion,' that means ALL of the Earth.”

And I had made the mistake of saying he had once raised money for Planned Parenthood.

Pastor Roger was demanding $25 million and an apology on the cover of
Bloomberg Businessweek
.

I had expected Ed Minskoff to be more stern with me, but then I realized that not only were my lawsuits keeping me employed, they were also keeping Ed Minskoff employed.

As I light up my first joint of the day, an Altria Strawberry Cough, I think that by now even those editors most disposed to give me a break must be tiring of my lousy performance. Surely, this has to be coming to an end. Then what will I do?

Thank God for my lawsuits.

“THIS IS MARK NAKAMURA, VICE
principal here at the Subway Fresh Take Paul Revere Charter Middle School, can you call us back as soon as you get this?”

Ronin was called into the vice principal's office, I am told when I call back. There has been an incident.