In This Ravishing World by Nina Schuyler

Author:Nina Schuyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Paradise

Hugh knows what he needs, what his family needs, and what is coming. New Zealand is the answer. Isolated, self-sufficient, clean water, clean air. Hugh pictures his family swimming in the blue ocean and birds in a blue sky. His son loves birds. Lush green hills, white sand. It has to be New Zealand. He keeps returning to water: clean drinking water will be an issue. So will heat. Drought. Fires. Smoke. Lack of food, Jesus, food will be a big issue. They could build a greenhouse and grow their food.

Hugh gazes out his big bay window at a bright San Francisco and a sky with tattered white clouds. Thoughts of what’s coming are like a pack of ravenous wild wolves nipping at his heels. He can feel their hot breath on his neck, hear their panting and growls, their paws pounding the pavement, the stringy saliva splattering, one solid leap to bite his neck, that’s how close they are.

Sailboats race across the water, and someone speeds on a windsurfer. And part of what’s coming is a stark divide, even more pronounced than it is now, between the Haves and the Have-nots. Have-nots—put that in the liability column for remaining in the United States because today’s rumble of civil unrest will seem tame, like a little roughhousing between boys. If you’re hanging on by your fingernails, morality is out and violence in. A gun to the back, to the head; a knife to the throat, at night, day—daylight won’t protect against abject desperation.

It’s got to be New Zealand, with its wealth heaped on the senses. Dick bought twenty acres and paid only four million, but he got in early. Roy bought land in Canada, but now he thinks it’s New Zealand, and Ben, good ol’ Ben, one of the biggest stoners at Columbia, now worth hundreds of millions, made the move to New Zealand permanent. His last Christmas card was a picture of him and his family of six, all smiles and tan with sun-kissed hair.

The wind is blowing, and the windows have taken on a chill. Below, cars crawl along stretches of shadow, and the bay looks like a sheet of hard metal. He respects metal, how durable it is, how versatile and resilient, and so many things made out of metal, though his entire adult life has had nothing to do with metal or the material world. Founder of MD CONNECT, he has more than five million of the ten to fifteen million doctors worldwide on his site, and the advertising revenue is mind-boggling. At Stanford Graduate School of Business he had to write a business plan, and his vision was MD CONNECT, though his professors warned, “Not likely. Get ready for a string of failures before you hit one out of the ballpark.” But this one hit, soaring into the big sky, and it’s still hanging up there like the blinding sun.

On his computer he pulls up one of the houses the real estate agent showed him half an hour ago.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.