The Performance by Claire Thomas

Author:Claire Thomas [Thomas, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

And on it goes.

Ivy knows the whole sequence by heart. It is one of Eddie’s favorite books, the one with a mole pictured on the cover, wearing gumboots and wielding a spade it does not need.

The love for that book has coincided with Eddie’s roaring stage, his compulsion to make the same undifferentiated noise at any nonhuman creature he encounters, both in a picture and in reality. Even if the animal is wearing a dress or driving a train in a book, he makes the same sound, that small roar, and he uses it for bears or moles or snakes, dogs at the playground, birds in a painting. Eddie always recognizes the animal as an animal, regardless of the species. He never confuses the human with the nonhuman. In his sub-two-year-old perception, a snake and a goat have more in common than a human and a goat, even a human and a gorilla.

Why does he perceive that? Is it something to do with language? Human beings speak, whereas nonhumans roar? Has he deduced that somehow? But, then, what does that categorizing mean for the preverbal infant?

Eddie’s roaring is a revelation to Ivy. No wonder we have destroyed the planet, she thinks, if the tiniest people have an innate sense of human exceptionalism. What hope do we have of finding a new way of being with the other beings?

I should invest in more environmental projects, Ivy thinks, shifting in her seat, pulling at her skirt.

For the benefit of future generations.

It is the great problem of our time.

It is the only problem of our time.

Nothing else matters if the earth is dead.

Climate change is the key moral question of the age.

She hears these insistent statements and knows there is a truth to them.

I have my limits, she thinks. I’m not Bill Gates. I cannot cure malaria or prevent a pandemic. Or even plausibly pretend to do so.

Ivy read recently about a man, a young man, a man younger than herself—there’s an increasingly applicable phrase—who is spending his tech billions on developing a machine that cleans up the oceans. The project hasn’t yet been successful. Large components of the machine keep breaking off in misunderstood tidal currents. Older, more conservative rich people keep finding fault in the younger man’s commitment. But he persists. A new prototype. A new team of engineers. A new testing zone.

What drive he has. What singularity of desire. Ivy doesn’t feel capable of such boldness. She doesn’t feel capable of seeing the world on that scale. She could clean up a beach, sure, but clean up an ocean? The oceans, plural? All oceans? No way. Her vision does not function so broadly, nor so particularly.

There are limits to her dreaming.

When Ivy went into her office earlier today—tag-teaming with Matt at home once she’d given Eddie some lunch—she sat at her desk in the city skyscraper and looked out to the dark mountain range at the edge of her view. By mid-afternoon, there were round clouds of smoke like storybook train gusts rising up across the range.

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