The Pruning Part II

Colombo, Sri Lanka

January 2, 2014

Things have been moving fast here.

What he’d told us is all proving to be right. I’d told Bohrs the bare details. I’ve always been able to trust him implicitly, but something still made me hold back. Perhaps it was the man’s words. I hadn’t shown him the vial, just described the signs, the general threat. I hadn’t mentioned M though. Bohrs trusts me implicitly too, I guess, and he knows my sources are good without having to ask.

And so he’d been on board. We had started house to house, hovel to hovel, collecting then analyzing the trace chemicals first on the structures, then on the people.

I had sensed it everywhere, or had that been another figment of my imagination?

The girl who had come up to me, so brazenly: had her brashness come from that, the disease that seemed to be spreading across her face, worming its way into her brain?

“That’s it. Look at her temples.” Bohrs had said, when she had finally turned to go, after spitting in the sand a few paces from me.

I hadn’t given her any money.

Bohrs had nodded and shaken his head.

“We’re in deep.”

I’d come here at his request. This was his cause after all.

Which had become mine.

“It’s the launching place,” the unidentifiable man had said, back in the Purple Mountains, back when he had handed us a thumb drive and vial of liquid. “Colombo.”

And so I had come.

“It makes sense.”

Bohrs and I are standing in an alley just big enough for the two of us, snaking backward from the beach into the more odious, labrynthine parts of the slum.

It seemed this ramshackle community, like the virus, was reaching its tentacles across the city, swelling until it might strangle the very heart of Colombo.

“Let’s go,” I say. “We’ve seen enough.”

He looks further down the alley, where the hovels seem to almost cave in on one another.

The whole world, caving in on itself.

Although that’s not the way it was supposed to work.

The terrible secret. The knowledge of it.

Weighty and unbearable.

“Will you come with me?”

A voice had just spoken from only a few feet away.

A dark-skinned man has just stepped out of a doorway, his face now illuminated in the white, cloud-bent light.

I take a step backward.

We aren’t supposed to be here.

“I think you want to come with me.”

The man flashes us something. Even worse: a badge.

My toes curl inward involuntarily. I want to run.

But I can’t.

Bohrs looks at the would-be-assassin, promptly lifts his gun to his forehead, and shoots, a deadened ping as the bullet escapes the silencer and the body crumples.

Nearby pigs start to squeal. A woman we hadn’t seen peering out a window begins to scream.

“Let’s go,” says Bohrs.

We turn back toward the widening part of the alley and run.

...

Delhi, India

January 2, 2014

Amit has known for a long time what he’s up against.

He flicks the last of his omelette on his fork, like mucus. Nana has undercooked it again.

He sighs and shakes his head, then wipes his hands with his linen napkin, and in one habitual motion, lets it fall to the table as he rises and turns. It is refuse, a deed done.

Back in the observation room hangs Neha.

He hadn’t meant to let it get this far. But in the end, she was just one body, just one soul. Compared to what they were about to gain, it was a small loss.

Amit’s phone rings as he is putting on his suit jacket.

“Master, she’s…gone.”

Amit pauses for a moment, listening to the sound of eggs being scraped off a plate into the trash.

He looks from his phone to his watch, silver and with a huge circular face. Analog. There was no other option, really.

“Alright.”

He is late. He purses his lips. “Take care of it.”

Then he snaps the phone closed, steps out to the door and into the waiting taxi.

Neha, he thinks.

First, she had denied it.

He had pushed her, just a little bit further, a little bit harder, the blows falling with a little more force.

Of course, it hadn’t been his practice to hit a woman, no, but this was important. And he was angry.

She had, in fact, gone to him. She had betrayed the cause., full well knowing what it would cost her, what it would cost them.

Now, blood again surges through his veins thinking of it.

Their betrayal, no, betrothal.

The day they had met, when he had sensed, almost immediately, the strange energy between them.

Perhaps they had known each other in another life.

And just hours ago, total betrayal.

She had been glossy-eyed and whimpering, shaking her head as the tears fell.

“I know nothing.”

A plea. A lie. Of course. For Neha knew everything.

She had been in contact with him.

And she had told him everything. And he must have told her something.

“She’s gone.”

Belal’s words popped again in his head like bullets, clipped and satisfying. They covered over the pain. Gone.

For the time being, Amit will have to continue eating his grandmother’s liquid omelets. There were worse fates.

Still, as the taxi turns out of his manicured neighborhood, his heart feels that terrible panic it had just moments after he had first met Neha, the awful desire to clutch onto a breathtaking mirage before it disappeared.

Gone.

And the ache is suddenly momentous.

...

Davos, Switzerland

January 2, 2014

Bente has made it to the summit without a hitch, despite the hitch that was two days prior, back home.

But the baby is fine and she’s not showing yet, and so she is here, the proposal on the screen in front of her, a small remote in her hand and her mouth a thin serious line across her face.

“We are infesting our planet,” she is saying.

Her stomach tightens involuntarily.

“All over the world, it is the same demographic that is perpetuating our population and climate crises. These are the very same people who are in turn suffering the most under adverse climate conditions. We must help.”

She clicks a button on the remote and a map of Sri Lanka lights up the screen. It is filled with darker and lighter green sections. She clicks again and the greens on the screen begin to move and morph, the darker patches getting smaller and lighter, and the lighter patches expanding.

“We imagine, once this program is put into place, that the populations in extreme poverty, marked by the darkest green, will shrink exponentially. Thousands if not millions of people will jump from one social class to the one above it, and as science has well-proven, they will finally begin to impact the climate positively: a tidal wave of change.”

She clicks the button and the screen goes dark. Bente looks around the room. She is accompanied by people who resemble the UN - stately and thoughtful, their skin colors a palate of all human possibilities.

“And how will we implement this?” asks a man with graying hair and leathery brown skin that looks as if it has lain for copious amounts of time out in the sun.

“Mr. Shakra,” says Bente. “That is where you come in.”

A few people shift in their chairs.

Mr. Shakra regards Bente for a long moment before opening his mouth. “And how exactly is that?”

Bente smiles. “Priming the pump, of course.”