Chapter 18 Julian
The light on the balcony has gone red. It does that in November, when the sun drops behind the building opposite and the last fifteen minutes of the day come through the gap between the buildings.
The light hits the pots on the rail, including the small hard-leaved thing my mother gave me three years ago that I have managed, against the odds, not to kill.
The ivy has gone russet at the tips. The hard-leaved plant has not changed color, but the light makes it look as though it has.
I stand at the open balcony door with a beer in my hand and I look at the plants.
I had liked the balcony. I’ve spent many Sunday mornings out there with coffee and the paper. I had told myself that it was enough, the small piece of green at the edge of the apartment, the four pots and the trailing thing on the screen.
I do not think it now.
The balcony is six feet by four. There are no birds. Instead, there is the constant low hum of the cross-town traffic. It smells of pollution, when in two weeks I had become accustomed to fresh air.
The buzzer goes.
Eli.
I go inside and press the door release without checking the camera. I leave the balcony door open. I cross the kitchen, open the fridge and take out a second beer for him, cracking the cap on the underside of the counter.
The elevator dings down the corridor. Eli lets himself in without knocking. He has had his own key to this place for years.
“Hello, brother,” he says, kicking his shoes off in the hall, then takes the beer off the island without asking. He clinks the neck of his against the neck of mine.
He leans on the island opposite me, with his elbows on the counter and his beer in both hands.
I take a drink.
“So, what’s up?” he says. “You called me. I came. Talk.”
I take another drink.
I had called him at half past four from the desk in the small spare room I use as a study. I’d had the laptop open in front of me and the EIA appendix on the screen and the published summary up beside it on a second window.
“You remember Parish Ridge,” I say.
“Hard to forget.”
“I’ve been reading the environmental reports.”
“Okay?”
I’ve left my laptop in the other room. I go grab it and come back, opening it up beside him so that he can see the screen.
“Page sixteen of the appendix.” I say, pointing. “That is the modeled drawdown across the south-east quadrant of the development radius for an operating window of forty years. But it’s on a reduced model. That is what the appendix says. That is what was submitted. That is what was approved.”
My brother gives me an exaggerated sigh. He looks at me and rolls his eyes. “I have no idea what you’re going on about. Leave out the jargon, you big nerd. What does that mean in normal people words?”
“The impact of the dewatering is far larger than they claimed. And they know it. They must.”
Eli looks at the screen. “That’s bad. Like. Bad bad.”
“Yeah.”
“How sure are you?”
“Completely. I’ve spent the last two weeks working out whether I am reading it wrong but I’m not.”
“So what’s your move?”
“That is what I’m trying to work out.” I shut the laptop and take a drink.
“I can take it to Richard Pace, show him what I know. He’ll then explain to me, calmly, that the project is approved, that the compensation has been paid.
And then he’ll quietly move me off the big projects.
The partnership will, at some point in the next eighteen months, quietly slow down. That’s option one.”
“Option two?”
“I could leak it. I send the appendix to the volunteer lawyer who has been working with the holdouts. That seems the most obvious. I can stay anonymous.”
“And…”
“And the list of people inside the firm who have access to that document is short and people with the motivation to leak it is even shorter. They’ll know it was me.
I’ll lose my job. Absolutely no doubt. And no one will hire me again.
Yes, the corporations talk big about responsibility but they don’t mean it. No one hires known whistleblowers.”
“Third option.”
“I file an affidavit. I send a copy to Pace and a copy to the county zoning board and a copy to the volunteer lawyer for the holdouts. I attach the appendix and I attach the published summary and I attach my analysis of the difference between them, and I sign it and I file it.”
“And…”
“And the firm sues me. Breach of fiduciary duty and breach of the firm’s data protection policy.
The accreditation board opens a review of my registration.
They will probably suspend it pending the review.
The review takes a year. It might find against me.
It might not. While the review is going on I cannot work. ”
He nods slowly. “Those are all shit options.”
He turns the bottle on the counter. He looks at it. “Jules.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do.”
“I know.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“I know.”
“I’ll have another beer.”
He stands. He goes to the fridge. He gets a beer and he opens it the same way I opened the first one, against the underside of the counter, and our mother would kill us both if she saw us doing it.
I had thought, when I called him at half past four, that I had the three options in front of me and all I needed to do was talk it through. I thought that was it.
It’s not. I am, as I sit at the island with my brother across from me and the second beer cold against my hand, absolutely furious.
I am angry.
I take a long pull on the beer. I set the bottle down too hard and the noise of it on the counter is louder than I meant.
“Sorry.”
Eli watches me.
What I keep doing instead, sat at this counter with the cold of the bottle on my palm, is seeing Pace’s hand. The hand on the desk between us, fingers spread and him saying the yokels will always find something to complain about.
I take another drink. The beer has gone warm in my hand and I do not care.
Eli has not said anything. Eli is good at that.
“They knew about it,” I say. “That kind of thing, it’s not my job. I know what that sounds like but it’s not. Someone else is supposed to check it and I took their word for it.”
Eli gets up. He goes to the cupboard above the stove where I keep the canned things and he opens it and shuts it.
He goes to the fridge. He comes back with a block of cheese and a packet of crackers and a knife.
He sets all three down on the counter between us and starts cutting cheese onto crackers without making a show of it.
I watch him do it.
The thing about Eli is that he has been my brother for thirty-three years and he has never, in any of that time, told me what to do.
He pushes the plate toward me. I take a cracker. I do not eat it.
“You want me to tell you what to do?” he asks.
“I am going to file the affidavit.”
“That’s what I thought.” He takes a cracker. He eats it, then he pushes the plate back toward me.
“Eat one.”
I obey dutifully. I take a long drink. I set the bottle down.
“First, I have an omega I need to talk to,” I say. “Not on the phone. Face to face.”
“Good talk,” Eli says. He raises his beer. I raise mine. Five minutes later, I start packing.