Splinterlands by John Feffer

Author:John Feffer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-725-9
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

In Arcadia

Though I had regained the use of my own limbs, I lay in my bed for many hours, motionless. I had thought that, as an observer, I could use the VR apparatus to wander safely no matter how dangerous the territory. After all, I’d watched a bloody battle in South Brussels and suffered nothing worse than brief hyperventilation. Now, however, I no longer felt protected, and what Benjamin had told me was even more disturbing. What was the new threat that he was determined to fight?

Distraught as I was, I missed my appointment with my ex-wife. She messaged me, concerned. I was usually so punctual. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that I’d fallen ill, and in a way, she was right. As she so often is.

To fortify myself, I pulled another can of iced coffee from the unit beneath my bed. My condition seemed to be spreading from my feet up my legs. I didn’t know how much time I had left, but it wasn’t a good sign. I put the VR apparatus back on and prepared to embark on my last trip.

I’d met Rachel when she was a graduate student and I was just starting at my first teaching job in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was 1994, and I was so filled with hope. The Cold War had ended. The threat of nuclear annihilation had been lifted. I’d just published my book on European integration, and I truly thought that Brussels represented the future of humanity. Of course, others gazed upon the peace and prosperity of Europe and deemed it the end of history altogether—as if history consisted only of bloody struggle and the glory that the combatants derived from it. In those days, I dismissed the fratricidal dissolution of Yugoslavia, the breakdown of order in Somalia, and the genocide in Rwanda as aberrations. Later I came to understand that they prefigured the future in a way that the endless meetings of the Eurocrats I studied with the devotion of a sports fanatic didn’t.67

Rachel didn’t share my early optimism, which was not surprising since her subject was climate change. Perhaps that’s why I was so attracted to her. We were such very different creatures. When I met her, Rachel Leopold was studying the effects of global warming on the Arctic. She was a student of ice. And I suppose you could say that I eventually became a student of fire. Maybe we weren’t made for each other, but in those early days we were certainly mad for each other. Later, what we produced in common—our children—held us together. When they left, our mutual love for literature and disdain for the meretricious weren’t sufficient to keep us together. We retreated into our elemental natures. She froze up and I burned out of control. But that came later, much later.

After Rachel finished her graduate work, we eventually secured two academic appointments in the Washington area and set up our household in the District. We raised our three children, born

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