Freebird by John Raymond

Author:John Raymond [Raymond, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

She didn’t sleep well that night—the pillows were too fat—and in the morning the town car was waiting again, ready to ferry her back home, following the invisible bread crumbs. Car to airport to car to home, every step greased with capital. How frictionless the world became with immense reservoirs of money on your side. She could get used to this life, she thought, to Mark’s life, that was. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she might have been trying out for more than being his consultant on this trip. If so, she wasn’t going to think about it now.

Sitting in business class—for only a two-hour flight, such a waste—she accepted a glass of white wine, hair of the dog, and a pile of unopened magazines, spreading herself out to the maximum degree. The plane took off, and the fuzz of mist clinging to the trees and valleys was like a fine mold growing on the fruit of the earth. The city banked in her window and shrank from view, and soon the ancient topography of the western rain forest was scrolling below.

The woods were but a shadow of their former self, a patchwork of clear-cuts in varying states of paltry regrowth, more a giant, groomed lawn than the primordial jungle of yore. It had taken billions of years for God to build this forest and only about a hundred years for men to mow it down. In two lifetimes the entire earth had been pruned and angled and sheared into this last, vestigial geometry.

She sighed and shut the plastic window shade, not wanting to see. She didn’t want to watch TV, either—that would only be more depressing—so she reached for a magazine but couldn’t find anything worth reading. She sighed and put the magazines back in the seat pocket and leaned back in the wide, comfortable seat. She closed her eyes, hoping sleep might take her, while speeding along at hundreds of miles per hour through empty space.

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