“Hence,” Pamela says into the recorder, “Dangerous words. No, scratch that. Let’s see. Color. What can we say about color? Well, all right, for one thing, color is temporal — not like words on a page where it takes two minutes or whatever to read a paragraph. But Time, as in the tenor of the times or the latter days of the twentieth century, fixes color and dictates color choices. A silly example — get a better one later — say I’m working on a portrait. I pause for lunch and read about the deployment of medium-range missiles in Western Europe and I think about the end of the world and my mind trips back to the passage from Revelation that my father forced-fed me every night, about the moon turning blood-red. So when I return to the portrait, I mix a little extra red into the skin color. Temporality has chosen the color for me because I live in a tragic, temporal world.”
Sometimes Adams sees colors when the band’s in the middle of a set. It’s as if there were a thin film of tinted water on the drums; when he taps them with a stick, sheets of blue-green, ruby, and yellow shimmer in the air.
“So much of modern art,” Pamela continues, “has no philosophical basis. It’s aimless and irresponsible, like the country. As such, it’s an accurate barometer of the country. But every choice of color and form is a moral choice. We discriminate, one instead of another. That’s why my art and my political consciousness are developing hand in hand, why the nuclear threat affects the way I draw a line.”
According to a front-page story in the Elgin Observer, the Honorable Frederick Palmer, congressional leader of the tenth district, has secured funds from the Bureau of Reclamation to build a dam on the north bend of Elgin Creek for the purposes of flood control.
Adams checks the records: Elgin Creek has never flooded. Carter and Palmer have figured out a way to make a profit on the dam, and have government funds to pay for it.
He’ll press harder for Greenland.
“Only one man I ever met had good reason for owning the land he did,” Otto tells Adams on the phone. The connection is weak, since Otto lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania where telephone linemen seldom service equipment. One of the richest men in the state, he chooses to live in a one-room wooden cabin full of squirrel shit and mice. “When I worked as a landman, we scouted ranchers to see if they were willing to sell mineral rights to their property, then we looked for oil and gas. One time I visited this old man in western Kentucky. He owned a bunch of woods down there, never had developed them. They’d turned to brambles but he wouldn’t sell. I asked him what he planned to do with that property and he said, ‘Nothing.’ When I asked him why, he said, ‘Cause there’s a wild child in there.’ I didn’t know what he meant. He told me a son of his had crawled into those woods soon after he was born and never was found. They could hear him late at night, though, howling with the wolves. And the old man wouldn’t sell — wanted to protect his son.”
Tracing grids, preparing to add the numbers. He remembers Deidre, at the age of two, trying to unfold a slip of paper. Until she had actually opened it, she didn’t know what the flat piece of paper would look like, though she had watched Adams fold it seconds earlier. Now that his divorce is final, Adams sees himself in this same blank relation to Pamela and the kids.
I’ve made a decision, Pamela tells him (by way of asking for a loan). After long years of fast food and automobile air conditioning, of learning to ignore, for the sake of my children’s uninterrupted happiness, the rapid decline of our dear urban centers, the dyeing of our air, dark, darker, as though it were an egg on Easter Sunday, the division of men into segments, the left hand literally not knowing what the right etc. (the inevitable result of a division of labor), the thinning of our bones in disgust as we bat the badminton birdie over poisonous lawns and gardens, entire communities smelling like burnt toast, the murderous revolt of our own tissue cramped as it is by carcinogens and Coke, perfume and smoke, and finally, Sam, after the failure of love, I have decided to wrap myself (along with hundreds of other women who have been running to keep the planet from crumbling under their slippered feet) around a nine-mile stretch of chain fence at Greenham Common, England, to pester and molest the young American men there dressed as soldiers, to goad them to distraction so that the deployment of medium-range American missiles cannot be accomplished with any degree of businesslike efficiency and pleasure. Joyously we will cling to one another in the mud and rain, tampons held proudly between our legs, hearts beating proudly beneath our breasts, our powerful female bodies blocking the birth of twilight. Don’t try to follow me, old friend, men have been banned from the Common, a source of consternation to those of us who feel that disarmament is not specifically a fern-inist issue; on the other hand, those are men’s missiles, vast and raw as Easter Island penises, leaning heavily on the children of the Soviet Union, the children of East Germany, the children of China, while their missiles lean in turn on the children of Europe, the children of the United States. Their children, our children.
Part Five
A BRIEF unexpurgated history of the world (when Toby was four years old and Adams asked him what he did today in preschool):
“We put clothes on our clothes for finger-painting and then we painted with our fingers and I ran out of paper and we took the clothes off our clothes and Mrs. Thompson she’s a girl took me to the back and helped me take my clothes off so I could wet the toilet and then it was time to rest. Then we ate bananas and looked at pictures and rested some more and Mrs. Thompson took Lisa Griffin she’s a girl too to the back and helped her take her clothes off so she could wet the toilet and then we rested some more when we were all dressed.”
Hundreds of women. Bobbies in blue. The women dragged off by the bobbies to jail. At night the women in jail. The bobbies as husbands at home, as fathers at home with their wives. No plan, not really, not really a plan to speak of. Missiles. Gleaming white silos, a chain-link fence that runs nine miles. In the daytime mud and rain, plastic hats, the husbands as bobbies at home. Fathers of a chain-link fence. Hundreds of women in the daytime, muddy and wet, weighty, resisting the bobbies, heavy yellow plastic trying to stop the deployment of missiles. I have to go there, Pamela said, where for nine miles the world is coming to an end.
“Attending one cause to the neglect of others inevitably foreshortens knowledge of the overall effect,” Adams writes in a letter to his brother. Pamela’s in London. He gave her five hundred dollars to help pay for her ticket. “The right breast is just as marvelous as the left and that, in part, explains this woman’s terrible arrogance.”
“Carter was furious this morning,” Jill tells him at dinner. “The county informed Palmer that the dam site is privately owned.”
“They’ve changed their tune, then. I thought the county claimed that land.”
“Within a week of the ground-breaking, city council dropped all legal proceedings.”
“Why would they do that?”
“It’s illegal for the government to fund projects on private property. The county obviously wanted to block construction of the dam.”
The Observer carries a full account: the dam had never been intended for flood control. It was meant, instead, to be a power source, generating hydroelectricity for homes in northern Elgin County — the lots that Carter had recently sold. The dam, privately owned by Carter and a few partners (Congressman Palmer among them, Adams figures), threatened to eat into the revenues of the Elgin Utility Company.