But in life—in grown-up, real life—who protected whom?
* * *
THE LAST TIME I’d seen him, just over a year ago, I’d been working late correcting summer-session papers in my office, my green banker’s lamp the lone light on campus at nine at night. In a swirl of whiskey-smelling air—no knock—Andy barreled in, plopping down across from me in the chair my students used to dispute their grades or garner advice, usually some thinly veiled version of I want to change majors.
Even drunk and distraught, Andy was so much more handsome than I would ever be beautiful. Burly and strong, but with an athlete’s grace. A solid six-footer, he had hair that grew wavy and thick, a rich auburn; mine was thin and fine like wispy smoke. His features were well defined, expressive: full lips, aquiline nose, deep-set, haunted eyes; without makeup I was washed-out, thin-lipped, snub-nosed, and tiny-eyed. So why did I feel like I was looking at myself when I looked at him? Why, after spending the day together, was some part of me taken aback to glance in the mirror and see myself? At the time, I didn’t understand it. The sensation felt oddly out-of-body, disturbing and sad at the same time. Was it because he—at his best—possessed so many of the qualities I could only dream of?
That evening he wore baggy khaki shorts I recognized from high school days and a filthy cotton madras shirt, one sleeve partially torn off. His skin glistened, as if he’d been running. The tang of Andy sweat, Andy panic, filled the tight space. Eyes red-rimmed and wild, he perched on the edge of the seat, leaning so far toward me he had to rest his elbows on my desk for balance. No air remained in the room.
He said, “Am I interrupting anything?”
It was the manic Andy who’d come to see me that night; it put me on guard and exhausted me. “What’s up?”
“You know it’s over, right?”
I exhaled and began to pack up my papers for the night.
“We’ve passed the tipping point. It’s already too late.”
“Please, Andy—” It’s not that I wasn’t freaked out about what was happening to the planet—I was—but I’d heard this rant countless times, and there was no stopping him once he started.
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Val. How much I talk about it, how much I lecture to my students, how much research I do, how many papers I write, presentations I give, how much I yammer on social media. It doesn’t matter how much anyone talks about it. Game over. It’s useless. This world, this beautiful world…” He dropped his head as if its weight was too much to bear. Stared at the rug, until he lifted his gaze, refocusing his unblinking eyes on mine. “Millions upon millions of animals are going to die, understand? Are dying. Each of them, big and small, in agony. Slow deaths. Starvation, thirst, disease, heat stroke. It’s happening now. Musk oxen breaking their legs crashing through melting permafrost. Polar bears drowning as they swim for sea ice that’s no longer there. Already ptarmigan eggshells are so thin they burst before the chick is ready to be born. Countless sea creatures—whales, shark, dolphins, octopuses, turtles, fish by the billions, Val—they’ll wash up on beaches, dead. Thousand-year floods will be yearly, catastrophic. Hurricanes like no one’s ever seen before, can even comprehend. And for us?” He shook his head. “Climate refugees in the millions, maybe billions. Water wars. Worldwide crop failure, starvation, more pandemics. Oceans will be acidic cesspools…” He looked up at me imploringly, as if there were anything his one-minute-older sister could conjure to comfort him. Finding nothing, he leaned back in the chair and gazed out my window with an expression of vague disgust. Slipped a can of Red Bull from his roomy shorts pocket and gunned it down with a shaky hand, forehead awash in sweat. “You want to know the real reason it’s hopeless?”
“Sure.”
“Because even if we got rid of fossil fuels tomorrow, which we won’t, fix everything that’s broken, which we can’t, the problem is, no one can fix human nature. We’re greedy, selfish, stupid, so, so fucking stupid, and shortsighted by nature. And that’s what’s going to kill us all. Hopefully.”
I stood and zipped my briefcase shut, snapped off my lamp. The lights from the soccer field filled the room with an eerie yellow glow.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
He chewed on a fingernail, assessed me. Scratched a bug bite on his leg; a constellation of red marks covered one thigh. Has he been sleeping outside? Eyes on the soccer field, he asked, “Can I stay with you tonight?”