Cost. Roxana Robinson
beneath Eliza's nails, her moist pink fingertips.
And maybe this guy didn't snore in bed, maybe he did it only on long bus trips, sitting upright, head lolling. He was younger than Steven, in a grimy T-shirt, pocketed cargo pants, grubby running shoes. He and Steven were the only people their age on the bus. Of course he'd sat here, next to Steven: age was the great divider. You understood only your own cohort; shared experience was the essential thing. Older people's lives were wholly different. They had no idea what Steven and his friends were like.
Nor could Steven imagine his parents’ world, that dim twilight epoch before his birth. People standing in the sun beside old cars, eating prehistoric food, their long hair and weird hippie clothes. Who knew what it had been like? All you knew of your parents came from them. There were no unmediated moments, you were handed history as your parents had written it. The material was theirs.
His father's childhood had been like this: the memory of his father coming home to the house in New Canaan, letting in a rush of cold air. Taking off his overcoat in the front hall, his first words a greeting to the dog. His mother, growing up in the stone house in Villanova, hiding in the forsythia bushes. The stories of his parents' childhoods made Steven feel strange. It was weird, thinking of them younger than he, still small and vulnerable, their adult lives ahead of them.
He picked up his paperback, wrapping the cover punishingly around its back. The book was bad, but he had nothing else to read. The video, played on the bus's tiny screens—a thriller, with pretentious dialogue and slow-motion gunplay—was over.
The roadside fence ended abruptly, and a string of chain stores ran smoothly past, their signs bright and urban. He wondered how the mall employees up here felt. Proud to be part of a national network? Angry at the exploitative wages? Glad to have a job, most likely. Steven shifted again, jamming himself into the corner, resting his head against the hard, humming window.
He wondered what his mother would say about graduate school. It would be the opposite of whatever his father said. One of them would ask, “Are you certain you need a law degree, Steven? Have you thought carefully about this?” The other would say, “Education is the highest privilege, of course you should go.” Probably Wendell would be in favor of it; Julia, more cautious, would have reservations. “What do you want to do next? What does it mean for your future? I want you to think ahead,” she'd say.
Both his parents had gone to graduate school, but when they were planning their futures, things had been different. People spent years at one place, their whole working lives. Loyalty was rewarded. You worked your way first to the outside wall, then the corner office. All that was over now, there was no such thing as job security. The idea of it seemed foolish and old-fashioned, like those big-brimmed brown hats men wore. A lifetime spent at one place, a gold watch at retirement: bizarre. Now no one stayed anywhere longer than five years; you worked somewhere until the next downsizing. There were no offices, people worked in cubicles without doors, with walls that didn't reach the ceilings. Or you worked at home, sitting before the screen in your sweats and a T-shirt, coffee rings on your papers, bagel crumbs colonizing the keyboard. Work was fluid now, a ribbon running through your life, not a box which contained you.
Everything was fluid now. The Internet, cell phones, communication, everyone was in touch all the time. On the sidewalk, people around you staring straight ahead, looking through you as they spoke into unseen ears. In a bookstore in Seattle he'd been ranging through the shelves while a woman nearby talked loudly to a friend. “You're going to have to get rid of her, Richard,” she said. “Her needs are not in alignment with yours. She's very, very demanding, and you're going to have to recognize this. You like to keep these women hanging around, but it's not healthy. Remember that time in the sauna?” He wondered who Richard was, and if he wanted an assessment of his private life broadcast so clearly and specifically in the Travel section of Elliott Bay Books.
But people talked to each other all the time, everywhere, loudly, in public; there was no privacy protocol. It was while you were traveling that you most wanted to connect. Everyone in airports had phones clamped to their heads, talking, talking, talking to make sure their lives at home were intact, that their places in the world were still held, that they were still connected to something. On 9/11, all those doomed people on the airplanes, calling home, as though the connection itself could keep them alive.
Steven gazed out the vibrating window and felt the humming of the bus through his body. He'd read somewhere that all engines hummed in the note of E. He wondered if it were true and, if so, why? Was it metallurgical—was all metal intrinsically tuned to the same key? Or to do with the way engines worked? Engines all over the world—mopeds in the Philippines, vacuum cleaners in Edinburgh (DC current), hairdryers in India, trucks in Detroit—all humming a jubilant, unheard, universal chorus.
Outside, the trees were in place again, foaming thickly over the fence. Behind him, unimaginably distant now, was Seattle: the low friendly city, with its glittering waterside, the peaceful rhythm of the streets.
He thought of Eliza at the café on the last day. Her silky blond hair, short and thick as suede. Her hands curved around her coffee mug: her stubby, bitten fingers, like a child's. The clay rimming the bitten nails, she was a potter.
“I might come back after Christmas,” Steven said, his words audibly untrue. They were sitting outside, on a cobblestone pedestrian mall. Behind Eliza he could see a street singer approaching them, with a battered guitar and a wide professional smile.
Eliza nodded, behind her mug.
“That'd be good.” She understood he didn't mean it. She looked at him steadily. “It's too bad there aren't any law schools out here.” This— gentle sarcasm—was the closest she would come to accusation.
Steven looked into his own mug, stirring it with the flimsy plastic stick. He could not explain exactly what had happened, how it had become clear that his time here was over.
The singer stood beside their table, already strumming. His guitar was held around his neck by a band of red hand-woven cloth. Steven looked up, the singer gave him a folksy grin. Steven's own face was stiff. “No, thanks,” he said.
Steven's arrival here, a year earlier, had seemed like the discovery of a new country—glittering water, amiable people, the unknown Western birds. That sense of being on the very edge of the continent, on the shore of the raging misnamed Pacific, with its towering storms and plunging surf. Beyond it all were the great reaches of Asia. The Northeast looked toward Europe, but here in the Northwest it was Asia you looked to, wide, ancient, and mysterious. Stretching above you was Canada's cool green wilderness.
Steven had wanted to leave the East for somewhere less known. He wanted to do something serious and positive, and in Seattle it was easy to find a project. Nature was nearby, and important; idealism was current.
He joined an environmental NGO set up to protect a stretch of old-growth Douglas firs from clear-cut logging. Everyone in NOCUT was cheerful and energetic. They went hiking together on weekends, they all loved the wilderness. Jim Cusack, the head of it, was in his mid-thirties, older than the others. He was bearded and friendly, and wore work boots and plaid flannel shirts. He knew how to get funding, organize, draft petitions.
Things went well at first. They raised money, collected signatures, were written up in the paper. They set up a meeting with a congressman who sat behind his desk in his shirtsleeves, frowning intently, listening, nodding at each point. He shook everyone's hand when they left. They felt exhilarated then, but later things began to stall. There were no more articles, and the logging company refused to take their calls. The congressman's schedule was now crowded. When it became clear that logging was imminent, Jim suggested guerrilla tactics. He said they should chain themselves to the threatened trees.
There was a collective thrill at the idea of action. This was more than making phone calls and collecting signatures. The idea of using themselves, their own bodies, aroused them. They knew they would succeed. They were invincible. This was a holy war, and they were on God's side.
The day of the chaining started early—the middle of the night, really. Steven got up while it was still dark, moving quietly through his apartment. He felt